YouTrip – Staff/Senior Backend Engineer Interview Experience

YOE: 8+ years
Prep time: ~3 months

---

Bar Raiser Round

Coding Question:

• LeetCode – Jump Game
• Also included a few questions about my recent projects.

Verdict:

• Self-assessment: Hire
• Actual: Hire

Notes:

• The coding question was straightforward.
• Be prepared to discuss real-world decisions in your past projects.

---

Hiring Manager Round (In Person)

Format:

• General discussion about projects I’ve worked on.
• Design a Booking Management System.

Focus Areas:

• DB schema design.
• Querying strategies.
• Scalability considerations.

My experience:

• Did well on DB design and querying parts.
• Completely messed up the scalability explanation.
  • This was my first in-person interview in a long time and the anxiety level shot up. :(
• HM was helpful and gave hints to steer me back on track.

Verdict:

• Self-assessment: No Hire
• Actual: Lean Hire

Reflection:

• Even if you struggle, staying calm and accepting hints can help recover.
• Interviewers often appreciate willingness to learn and adapt.
• Read about CAP theorem and how to use in real life applications.
• Read about distributed systems. Learning this book is a big must in clearing Design rounds.
  • https://dataintensive.net/

---

System Design Round

Prompt:

Design an e-commerce application.

Focus Areas:

• Database design.
• Scalability trade-offs.
• Minimal focus on APIs.
• Queuing requests.
• Using Redis to improve latency.

Suggestions:

• Be ready to dive deep into scalability.
• Think through failure scenarios:
  • What happens if Redis goes down?
  • How would you ensure replication and fault tolerance?
• Clearly articulate trade-offs and fallback plans.

---

Final Result

• Overall decision: Hire
• Role: Senior Backend Engineer (not Staff Engineer)

Notes:

• Happy with their decision to move forward with the Senior role.
• Ultimately had to reject the offer due to compensation issues.

---

Key Takeaways

• For coding rounds, keep your fundamentals sharp.
• For HM/System Design rounds:
  • Be comfortable explaining DB schemas in detail.
  • Don’t neglect scalability.
  • Practice talking about replication, caching, queuing, and failure handling.
• In-person interviews can feel different—consider doing mock interviews if you’re out of practice.
• Even if you feel you did poorly, interviewers may still see potential if you show you can learn and adapt.

---

I hope this post helps others in their preparation. Feel free to reach out if you'd like more detail about any round!