The hiring process is competitive and aims at filtering apt candidates all the way up to the offer with a well-thought-out process. HR is well-structured in coordinating interviews and arranging travel, tickets, etc., for on-site candidates.

The on-site interviews are a unique experience. The software developer round is like any other core development interview (with Amazon, Indeed, etc.), with a focus on algorithms and then optimization. You will definitely crack this if you are already working in a serious coding environment.

The tricky ones are architecture interviews because none of the conventional understanding will work here. You may be able to approach the question with the right solutions, but unless you hit the right "jargon" words, the interviewer won't give you points. So, it's hinged on the following aspects:

• Design a system with zero single points of failure.
• Describe algorithms for peak data handling.
• Describe acceptable turn-around time and fault tolerance.

This requires basic knowledge of load balancers, DB sharding, in-memory caches, and products like Redis, fast-config lookup such as ZooKeeper, and, of course, the ability to knit them all together.

The architecture interview was about describing the system I'm currently working on and analyzing its failure points.