My interview experience with [Company Name] started off smoothly. After an initial call with the recruiter, I had a first interview with a manager, which was a typical behavioral interview. Following that, I participated in a live coding interview and a system design interview, for which I received the prompt beforehand. There was also a values interview. After passing these stages, I met with the director of the hiring team and the manager. Although the impression I got from the final interview was positive, I experienced radio silence for two weeks afterwards. Neither the recruiter nor the talent coordinator responded to my messages. Eventually, the recruiter contacted me to inform me that they had moved forward with another candidate. They mentioned that my system design was too overkill for the requirements, which was not the impression I had during the interview. They also said I was a backup in case the other candidate did not accept the offer, but I was never contacted again.

Recruiter screen - Standard questions around past experiences, role, expectations and so on Staff Engineer round - In depth technical questions around your experience, I really enjoyed this as it wasn't bare minimum surface level checkboxes but they really challenged me on complex problems I solved Moved onto onsite Live coding round - A mix of leetcode style and practical stuff I really enjoyed this round as it was a hybrid of both. As long as you have solid foundation of data structures and algorithms and also your everyday the way you code like concurrency, best practices, multithreading you should do just fine System design round - Probably one of the best design rounds of my career. Technically very in depth and challenging, it wasn't another SQL or NOSQL database choice they wanted me to go into deep low level details on various components so really understand the tradeoffs and discuss your design decisions. It's not about how much you got done but how well you know why you're making a choice and justify them. HM round - Behavioral questions on past experiences, very role specific and quite challenging Culture round - How you fit with the company culture, this was a lot more depth than I thought so really know your stuff on resume and what you did and what impact it made. You will get material to prepare before every round and that's way more than enough and most people I met weren't so difficult even if I made mistakes I was able to comfortably work through with them and it felt more like a pairing session across. The process was very smooth and the recruiter made sure the experience was very positive and they were quite accommodating with schedules in case of changes. The people I met for sure were technically good and also had good attitude to navigate engineering problems so I ended up accepting the offer