Yugabyte SDE Interview

My interview process at Yugabyte for the SDE role was structured into four distinct rounds, each designed to assess different facets of my technical and interpersonal skills.

Round 1 – Technical Round

This round focused on my system design capabilities. The main question was to Design a Hit Counter. The discussion delved into handling high-concurrency write requests and ensuring memory-efficient data storage. I explored using circular buffers or buckets to manage time-based counts within a specific window. The follow-up challenged me to scale the counter to handle millions of requests per second and ensure accuracy in a distributed environment.

Round 2 – Concurrency & Problem Solving

This round began with fundamental questions on concurrency, covering thread lifecycle and common race conditions. Following this, I was asked to Design and implement a word auto-complete suggestion feature for keyboards. My approach involved utilizing a Trie (Prefix Tree) data structure for efficient word storage and a search algorithm for prefix matching. The interviewer then asked me to consider optimizing the Trie for memory and incorporating weightage or frequency to improve suggestion relevance.

Round 3 – Algorithms & Systems Logic

The algorithms segment presented a classic DSA problem: Find the median of two sorted arrays. After solving this, the focus shifted to system logic, where I was tasked with devising a Strategy for zero-downtime key rotation in a Master-Slave architecture. The specific scenario involved Master nodes SSHing into slave nodes using a private key, with slave nodes verifying using a public key.

Round 4 – Behavioral Round

The final round was a deep dive into my past projects and technical challenges over the last four years. The discussion primarily revolved around my experiences with conflict resolution within a team, how I've handled tight deadlines, and my motivations behind choosing Yugabyte.