Rubrik | Senior Engineering Manager | March 2026 | Rejected

1st round (System Design) - Design a config store that store service config values for A/B testing. System should support 50K/s reads and 5K writes/day. The values are boolean (feature enabled/disabled) and should also support percentage based rollout of features or customerid based rollout.

Gave a solution based on dynamodb, redis cache, bloom filters and a scale set of service hosts. Interviewer was satisfied with solution and the discussion of tradeoffs and non functional requirements.

2nd round (System Design) - You have at your disposal a master node and some spare capacity on a set of (unreliable, crash prone) nodes. Design a system to count the most frequent set of english words across all github repos. You are not allowed to use any managed services though you can install software (e.g. an embeddable db) on the nodes.

Could have done much better in this round, I gave a solution based on min-heap + count-min sketch. There were many follow ups which I bungled to some extent, still the verdict was positive.

3rd round (Past projects) - Problem here is to describe your past project in detail, recruiter will prep you for this and you are supposed to describe something having distributed systems, algorithmic complexity not just CRUD/integration challenges.

I described a production component with a strong distributed systems aspect. Interviewer however could not understand the context and was only listening to some keywords and pattern matching them to other systems. e.g. when I said round robin scheduling he said that's a problem based on the fact that it has issues in other setups (like load balancing http). However, it was apt for our use case. Overall, I felt mixed about my performance in this round. The interviewer did not feel all that knowledgeable to be conducting this round. Advise for this round is to avoid conventional lexicon (like round-robin or at-least once delivery) that interviewer can pattern match to pick apart your project.

Got a rejection email after 2 weeks. Poor experience overall. 3rd round was unmethodical and Recruiter ghosted for 2 weeks before sending a rejection.