How did I learn about the role?

I applied for a Staff Engineer position on the American Express Careers Portal. An Amex Recruiter contacted me by phone a few weeks after my submission.

What is my years of experience?

17 Years

What is my expertise?

Architecture: Distributed, Microservices, REST, Event-driven, API Programming: Object-Oriented (Java Spring Boot (latest experience)), Node.js (past experience), Spark (past) Messaging and Streaming: Apache Kafka Database: Relational DBMS such as Oracle, Exadata. NoSQL DB such as Mongo Packaging & Container Orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes

Interview Process

The first round was a Hiring Manager Interview (Online - 30 minutes) consisting of the following areas:

• Introduction
• Advertised job profile explanation
• My past experience
• How I handled challenges and disappointment in my professional life
• Experience dealing with customers

The second round was a Karat-driven video interview consisting of the following sections (Total time 60 minutes):

1. System Design Questions (25 minutes): 3 to 4 questions emphasizing best practices, drawbacks of given problem statements, estimation for budget considering a specific time duration, and changes needed to scale. Some of the questions I remember are:

   • There is a video streaming app using physical servers to host multiple copies of the same video. What are the improvement areas?
   • There is an online crossword puzzle app. A hint-giving feature is being planned with two approaches: getting a hint by hitting a server, or having it built into the app. What are the advantages and drawbacks of each approach?
   • There is a need to process a large XML file on a local computer, and this process is exhausting the computer's RAM. How do you resolve this issue?
   • A Facebook-like app, popular in the US, plans to launch in other countries. Necessary front-end changes have been incorporated. What changes are needed in the back-end to launch in other countries?
   • Questions about the factors needed to consider when planning a budget for system design.

2. Coding Problem (30 minutes): A piece of code and a problem statement were provided. Emphasis was on the approach to solve the problem.

Karat sends feedback to the hiring company (AMEX) as soon as the assessment is over (within 30 minutes). The candidate receives an email confirmation stating that feedback has been sent to the hiring company.

I called the AMEX HR the next day twice, but my calls went unanswered. An email sent to them yielded a response stating, "Feedback is still awaited from Karat." They did not revert when I replied, stating that Karat had already confirmed they had sent the feedback. I followed up a week later, and the HR responded by saying the feedback was negative. The HR then went incommunicado when I asked for the detailed assessment from AMEX, which they would have received from Karat.

A few questions still puzzle me regarding AMEX's hiring transparency:

• AMEX HR conveniently does not answer your calls and lacks the professionalism to return your calls.
• AMEX HR evades responding to your queries. In my case, they claimed feedback was not received when they had already received it from Karat.
• AMEX does not share detailed assessment feedback as part of their hiring process and goes incommunicado.

Described in the "Interview process" section.