Visa | Software Engineer | Bangalore | May 2025 [Selected]

About Me

• Education: B.Tech in ECE from NIT (2024 Graduate)
• Years of Experience: 10 months at a product-based startup

Round 1: CodeSignal Assessment

• Format: 4 coding questions
  • 1 Easy
  • 1 Medium
  • 1 Medium-Hard
  • 1 Hard
• Outcome: Solved all of them successfully.

Round 2: Technical Interview (20th May)

• Type: Purely discussion-based (Approx. 1 hour)
• What Happened:
  • Deep dive into resume and past work (~30 mins)
  • Detailed discussion on projects and contributions at the current company
    • For example, when Kafka was mentioned:
      • Why Kafka?
      • Alternatives?
      • Architecture-level questions and trade-offs
  • 1 DSA Question:
    • Problem: Given a log file with timestamps and IPs, rate-limit IPs making more than x requests in a 10-minute window.
    • Started with: What is a DDoS attack? How to prevent it?
    • Approach discussed: Sliding Window
    • Follow-up: What if the log file is in GBs?
      • Suggested solution: Use external sorting to process large-scale data

Round 3: Technical Interview (22nd May)

• Deep dive into resume, tech stack, and projects (~40 mins)
  • Detailed questions on:
    • Project architecture
    • Tech stack decisions
    • Work at the current company
• DSA Question:
  • A variation of the Aggressive Cows problem (SPoJ – AGGRCOW)
  • Required applying binary search on answers. Wrote code with all edge cases covered.

Round 4: Hiring Manager Round (26th May)

• Got grilled on resume and system design (~40 mins)
  • In-depth discussion on:
    • Work done at current company
    • System architecture choices
    • Scalability and performance trade-offs
  • Used Excalidraw to draw and explain architecture
• Behavioral Questions covering collaboration, ownership, decision-making
• Ended with me asking questions about the team, role expectations, and future direction

• Received positive feedback the next day.