Salesforce SMTS/LMTS

I interviewed at Salesforce on October 14th for an onsite interview. The entire process took about 1.5 months. I have 8 years of experience in software engineering.

Round 1: [Performed well]

• Print all paths from the top-left corner to the bottom-right corner of a matrix.
• Evaluate an expression; similar to the Calculator III Leetcode problem.

Round 2 [High-Level Design] [Performed well]:

• Design a rule engine for a banking system. For example, if a user's salary is X and their account is 10 years old, they should receive a Z% discount.
• I designed the system well. I believe it would have been a strong hire.

Round 3 [Hiring Manager] [Performed well]:

• Technical discussion about my past project. The hiring manager asked me to modify some aspects of the project. I performed well.
• Design a system for displaying match scores similar to Hotstar. [Performed well]
• Other typical questions.

HR called and informed me that I had cleared the SMTS (Software Engineer III) level. However, my compensation expectations were higher than their band. So, they told me they would process me for LMTS (Software Engineer IV).

Final Round for LMTS [Low-Level Design]:

• Design Stack Overflow.
• I designed the schema for Stack Overflow and performed well.
• I also wrote code for it.
• The interviewer then asked about the search functionality. I explained the considerations well.
• He wanted me to write code for how Elasticsearch performs searching, specifically the data structure it uses (LSM tree, etc.). I did not perform well in this part.

Apparently, it's all about luck. My final interview should have been a hire. I performed very well overall. But the interviewer told me it was a no-go for LMTS. Tough luck.

She also told me there was another opening for LMTS. She would process my profile for that. But I want to take a moment to accept this rejection and move on. There's no point in clinging to it. So, I'm moving on.