Interviewed at Sydney HQ.

Contacted by recruiters via LinkedIn.

Details of the first interview:

• 30-minute HR phone call.
• 1-hour onsite coding interview.

During the coding interview, I was given PDF documents and a password-protected code.zip file the day before. The interviewer provided the password on-site.

There were three tasks, with the first one having multiple sub-tasks. I only managed to fix the first task with its sub-tasks. The expectation was to fix them all.

After the interview, the feedback mentioned something along the lines of: "a bit slow, not enough experience..."

For future candidates, don't worry too much about your thinking process. Just go ahead with the debugger to find the cause – it's much faster. Since the project isn't very big, it's easy to debug.

They invited me to the next round: a 1.5-hour onsite technical interview with two interviewers.

I was asked to describe a recent project. My challenge was that the project I presented was the peak of my experience in terms of size and complexity, and it wasn't recent (finished 1.5 years ago). Consequently, I didn't remember some of the details.

The interview then moved to questions and answers about Java, design, architecture, and scalability. I had incorrect expectations for this interview; I thought it would mainly focus on system design. However, they asked many questions related to Java, memory management, common leak causes, how to fix them, deadlocks, thread dumps (how to read and generate), what I would fix in Java, my second favorite language besides Java, and why. They also covered good design of REST APIs, GC-related topics, and how it works.

The third part of the interview involved coding a thread pool (a classic problem).

The feedback I received was that they didn't understand my project and that I had shallow Java knowledge. The coding part was good.

Conclusion: I should have prepared more for a typical Java developer interview, especially for the questions and answers section. The recent project should have been well-defined.

Advice for future candidates: Ask for clarification, something like, "Does that answer your questions?"

Memory management and leaks: main causes, how to fix.

Deadlocks and thread dumps: how to read and generate.

What I would fix in Java.

My second favorite language besides Java and why.

Good design of REST APIs.

Garbage collection related topics: how it works.

Security: main types, how to fix.