LG Ad Solutions | SSE 2 | 6.5 YOE | Interview Experience

YOE: 6.5 years

College: Tier 3

Current Org: US-based startup

Current TC: 46 LPA fixed + 20 LPA ESOPs (4 years vesting)

Role Interviewed For: SSE 2

Round 1 – DSA (1 Hard + 1 Medium)

This round was completely LeetCode-style.

Hard Problem: Based on Binary Search.
It wasn’t a straightforward binary search on array. It was more of a binary search on answer type problem with edge cases and constraints handling. The key was identifying the monotonic property and carefully handling boundaries.

Medium Problem: Based on Graph.
Classic graph traversal problem (BFS/DFS type). Focus was on correctness and handling corner cases.

Discussion was interactive. Interviewer cared about:

• Thought process
• Edge cases
• Time & space complexity
• Clean code

Overall, this round went well.

Round 2 – HLD (High-Level Design)

This was a proper system design round.

Started with designing a system end-to-end.

Discussed DB design in detail (schema, indexing, trade-offs).

Then interviewer zoomed into one critical component and asked:

• How would you scale this?
• How would you avoid bottlenecks?
• What would you cache?
• How to handle failures?

We discussed:

• Horizontal scaling
• Partitioning strategies
• Caching layers
• Load balancing
• Handling traffic spikes

This felt like a strong discussion rather than Q&A. Good signals here.

Round 3 – Hiring Manager Round

This was the most interesting round.

He gave a very tricky real-world scenario and asked:

“You built this system. Now how do you make it production-ready?”

Instead of jumping into random solutions, I:

• Clarified requirements
• Listed assumptions
• Built a mental checklist:
• Observability (logging, monitoring, alerting)
• Reliability & fault tolerance
• Deployment strategy
• Rollback strategy
• Performance testing
• Security considerations
• Data validation & edge cases

Explained each point sequentially and in depth.

He also asked:

• Why do you want to move?
• What are you looking for?
• What motivates you?

Some behavioural questions around ownership and conflict.

Overall, the round went super good.

Currently waiting for HR response. I’m confident I cleared HM round.