Postman SDE (Fullstack) Interview Experience

Round 1 (Recruiter connect)

This initial phone screening with the recruiter focused on my experience and expertise across various technologies. Following this discussion, my profile was shortlisted for the Hiring Manager round.

Round 2 (HM Connect)

In this round, I spoke with a manager who questioned me about fundamental web technologies, including how a browser operates and some basic CSS concepts. We also delved into backend system design and scalability. The objective was to assess my foundational understanding of both frontend and backend technologies.

Round 3 (Technical Knowledge)

This round involved a discussion with an SDE-2. The primary focus was on my past projects, leading to many questions related to event-driven architecture, given its prominence in my work. We also covered REST APIs, designing a scheduling service, and discussed indexing and sharding in depth. Overall, I felt this round went very well, which allowed me to progress to the next stage.

Round 4 (Machine Coding)

My final round was another session with an SDE-2. Here, I was given a machine coding task: implementing a URL shortener. We began by discussing the problem statement, after which I outlined my proposed approach and started coding in Node.js. I faced a minor challenge during implementation, but with a helpful hint, I managed to fully solve the problem and produce working code. We then proceeded to test the API using Postman and discussed potential improvements and scalability considerations for the solution. I consider this round to have been successful.

Two days later, I received an email from HR informing me that my application would not be moving forward. The reason stated was that the role required more frontend focus, whereas my primary experience lay in backend development. While disappointed, I view this experience as a valuable learning opportunity.