Atlassian P5 | Uber L5a | Rippling L7 | Vmware SMTS

I have 9 years of experience working at top product companies. I prepared for interviews from March to June . I solved over 300 LeetCode problems, including 50 hard, 200 medium, and 50 easy problems. I focused my preparation on system design in the last two months because I was getting rejected in previous interviews. I interviewed with 10 companies and was rejected by the first four. I received offers from the last six companies.

Rejected : Skyflow, Confluent, Rubrik, UiPath (All senior engineer kind of roles) Offered : Atlassian P5, Uber L5a, Rippling L7, Vmware SMTS, Eightfold Lead/Senior, Google (offered L4, interviewed for L5)

Difficulty order

Confluent ~= Uber > Rubrik > VMware ~= Atlassian > Google > Eightfold

Atlassian | Medium Difficulty | Remote ()

1. Karat screen with two DSA questions and a system design rapid fire. I cleared this round because I had previously done similar things for Indeed/Coinbase.
2. DSA+LLD : The DSA question was on LeetCode, just need to take care of clean coding practices.
3. DSA : Again, the DSA question was on the internet. I suggested two approaches, wrote clean & modular code for one of the approaches.
4. HLD : Not on LeetCode and not the common one but I did well from requirements to designing the whole system.
5. Values : Similar to other posts covering 5-6 company values
6. Management round : Similar to other experiences covering examples from past experience

Uber L5a | Difficulty Hard |

1. DSA : Popular LeetCode medium on graph but slightly changed to hard if you were to space optimize the graph from matrix to map. Clean code & completion of both the matrix & map approach within 1 hour was enough for the interviewer to give me a hire call.
2. DSA+LLD : Never seen before on LeetCode posts, I wrote the interface and two classes for two use cases. I could only write one correctly, but still got a hire without being able to complete both the use cases.
3. System Design : Not so popular design question but I managed to complete the given use cases within time with a nice diagram.
4. Bar raiser (Past design) : Past technical project explanation and tech learnings, challenges etc
5. Hiring Manager : Best hiring manager round with examples from past experience for typing behavioural scenarios

Rippling L7 | Difficulty Medium-Hard |

1. DSA : Never solved before but medium difficulty LeetCode question
2. DSA : Others have posted similar questions, not on LeetCode
3. Design-1 : Others have posted similar to that
4. Design-2 : Again similar to other posts on LeetCode
5. HM : Easiest, few basic questions on current work experience + product demo. I asked a lot of questions on the tech behind it and it turned me off.

I decided not to join Rippling because of their work-life balance, inflated valuation & lower quality engineering work, so I gave them a very high expectation number. The recruiter never came back (as expected).

Vmware SMTS | Difficulty Medium |

1. Initial screening : With Director, discussion on current work & what they are looking for, basic technical questions
2. DSA [1 hour] : Digging on past work experience and then solved two medium LeetCode questions
3. LLD+Coding [1 hour ] : The role was Golang+Kubernetes specific, so I provided the LLD & wrote code in Golang.
4. DSA [1 hour] : One LeetCode medium on binary tree, I provided clean code, and ran it.

Google L5 | Difficulty medium |

1. DSA : Medium difficult question, I explained & wrote clean code. The interviewer gave feedback with nitpicks & red flagged the revisions which I made while the initial approach vs implementation. Obviously, you will uncover things as you go, but it looks like they want you to mug up solutions and vomit out perfectly.
2. DSA : Medium difficulty, non-LeetCode, I explained and solved just fine, again got nitpick feedback
3. DSA : LeetCode hard, I explained & code covered most except an edge case. I revised the approach but couldn't fix the code due to strict time.
4. Design : Very domain-specific design question, I covered most aspects of design and got nitpicked feedback.

I was asked if I am interested in L4, I declined without a second thought. I heard downlevel stories on Blind but it was first-hand experience and Google interview feedbacks were a big time turn off. It looks like if you mug-up code+time/space complexities and give answers without thinking/revising, you are good, otherwise, you struggled to do this/that. Obviously, you are not supposed to evaluate your approaches this vs that while you code, for example, writing a separate utility function vs putting something in a complex if condition. I got a negative nitpick for this one.

Eightfold Senior/Lead Engineer | Medium difficulty

1. LLD : Gave some vague robot problem, I had to design class interaction and their functions
2. HLD : Domain-specific question, I solved it and gave some LLD and HLD. The interviewer was some 3-year exp guy with not so good communication skills (no ego issues for sure over exp). I had to literally explain to him that this/that feature is provided by Kafka which I used in my HLD. This round turned me off with the quality of their engineering team.
3. HM : Past work, what I am looking for in a new job etc. I declined to engage as they said they can't match my previous offers with all cash. I was not interested to hold paper ESOPs over public RSUs from others.

Confluent Senior Engineer | Hard difficulty level (Rejected) Similar to what others have posted.

1. DSA : DP Hard
2. Concurrency coding : Popular concurrency interview question
3. Design-1 : Similar to Twitter/Insta feed generation
4. Design-2 : Popular HLD question from ...ing sys-de88gn I got a hire except for the design-1 round for minor things and was rejected. I had to improve a lot on concurrency problems for Confluent and they helped me later on in other interviews.

Rubrik Senior Engineer | Medium-Hard (Rejected)

1. Concurrency Coding : Popular concurrency question
2. DSA : Popular design+dsa question using DLL & map
3. Design-1 : Similar to other posts
4. Design-2 : Design of one of the LinkedIn features
5. HM : Past experience

UiPath Senior Engineer | Medium (Rejected)

1. DSA : Sliding window based popular question
2. DSA : Never saw on LeetCode, I gave a wrong greedy solution, which looked to be working for many test cases and the interviewer could give a single example to break the wrong solution. I realized this after the interview.
3. Design (LLD) : LLD, class diagram of something like Stack Overflow. I was rejected after this.

Skyflow Senior Engineer | Medium-Hard (Rejected)

1. DSA : Something on binary tree, I solved it
2. DSA : Never seen something like this on LeetCode but I solved & wrote the code
3. DSA+Design : Graph Hard, I solved using backtracking + design of hit counter (something like a website views with multiple instances)

For help other than interview question details reach : [email protected]