I applied through the website, and the process took approximately two months.

First, I spoke with a recruiter. Then, I completed a technical screen over data structures via Zoom. The interviewer had an excellently written question, and it was a very positive experience.

Next, I was transferred to another recruiter who scheduled the full interview loop and provided notes on what to expect for each round.

On the day of the loop, there was an issue with the Zoom meeting: the meeting ID had changed but was not updated in the Zoom invite. This detail becomes relevant later.

First was the system design interview. I had a great interviewer, and after the design, we discussed scaling, reliability, database systems, and overall design. Partway through, the interviewer noticed that I had missed one of the requirements, so I added it to my design. I was not dinged for missing this item. The feedback on this round was that I focused on a REST API and a microservices architecture, which I felt was completely fair.

Next was the values interview. After waiting on Zoom for five minutes, I emailed the interviewer to mention the updated meeting ID. The interviewer joined shortly after and thanked me for letting them know. This was a conversation where I was asked questions regarding past experiences. For this round, I recommend simply being open and honest. The feedback from this round was very positive.

Now, the code design round was where the experience fell apart for me. After waiting for five minutes on the call, I emailed the interviewer to mention the change to the meeting ID. When he joined the Zoom, he seemed very upset and perturbed that I had emailed him about the change. The question was ill-defined, and when I asked for clarification, I was rebuffed with, "Everything is there. I don’t care if you talk or not. Just code." Frankly, I did not understand what I was building at first, and the interviewer refused to elaborate. Afterwards, he was very explicit that I was not to email the next interviewer and that he would take care of it. My personal impression was that he was irritated that I emailed him when he was late to the interview with the updated meeting ID. This was an incredibly negative experience. The last time I had an interview that was so negative was about ten years ago.

Last was the leadership interview. This went well, and I was asked primarily about my last project, which we dove deeply into. This was a positive experience, and I received positive feedback.

The day after the loop, I received the "No Hire" result, and I was relieved. If I had, by some miracle, received a "Hire" result, I am not sure I would have accepted. All I could think was that if 20% of their hand-picked interviewers were this terrible, then this might be an awful place to work.

Data Structures - Implement a voting system with a constant stream of votes.

System Design – Design a tagging system.

Code Design – Rate Limiter.

Here is the exact question I received.

Problem Title: Rate Limiter

Problem Description: Imagine we are building an application that is used by many different customers. We want to avoid one customer being able to overload the system by sending too many requests, so we enforce a per-customer rate limit. The rate limit is defined as: “Each customer can make X requests per Y seconds.”

Assuming that customer ID is extracted somehow from the request, implement the following function.

// Perform rate limiting logic for provided customer ID. Return true if the // request is allowed, and false if it is not. boolean rateLimit(int customerId)