Outreach September Staff Engineer
Summary
I recently interviewed for a Staff Engineer role at Outreach. The process involved a technical round focused on designing a key-value store with undo/redo capabilities, followed by a system design round for a multi-tenant chat application. Despite a positive initial round, I was ultimately rejected after the system design.
Full Experience
My interview journey for the Staff Engineer position at Outreach began with the first round, where we started with a brief discussion about my current and past work experiences. Following that, I was presented with the main technical challenge: to design a key-value store that supports set(key, value), get(key), delete(key), undo(), and redo() operations. I felt confident in my approach and was able to solve it quickly, paying close attention to the completeness of my solution and thoroughly covering all edge cases. A key takeaway from this round was the importance of clarifying assumptions upfront, a tip I definitely kept in mind. The feedback I received for this round was positive, which was encouraging.
Moving on to the second round, it was a dedicated System Design session. We began by reviewing some of my previous projects, which led into the core problem: designing a multi-tenant chat application. I presented my approach, but unfortunately, I was rejected after this round. I'm still unsure about the specific reasons for the rejection from this round, as I thought my design covered the necessary aspects.
Interview Questions (2)
I was asked to design a key-value store that supports the following operations: set(key, value), get(key), delete(key), undo(), and redo(). The interviewer emphasized the importance of a complete solution and covering all edge cases, advising me to clarify any assumptions upfront.
The task was to design a multi-tenant chat application. This involved considering various architectural components, scaling challenges, and how to logically separate data and functionality for different tenants.