I had a call with a recruiter, understood the teams, and set up a phone screen. I cleared the phone screen and scheduled an onsite interview. It had a panel of 5 people.

1. One person was in a high leadership position. For over an hour, he discussed Coupang's business. He spoke very little about technology and even less about the projects he managed in the past. At the end of the interview, he gave me an algorithmic question for which he only wanted the idea for solving the problem.

2. The second person learned about my background and asked me to code a tree traversal problem on a blackboard. I solved it using recursion, then he asked me to do it iteratively as well. He asked a design question about creating a marketplace on a website, to which I gave an in-depth answer.

3. The third interviewer gave me a paper stating the problem. I had to hit an API, get the data, and display it on the console, including pagination. I coded this from scratch on my laptop and gave it to him. I could look up internet resources for usage or examples if needed.

4. The fourth interviewer asked me to write a Spark job on the blackboard. I struggled as I was not informed that I would be asked questions specifically related to a particular technology, so I had not brushed up on it.

The interviews did not stick to the original time plan, and I left the office over an hour later than scheduled. The first interviewer bored me. I disliked being grilled on a specific technology. The third interviewer just sat there and did not ask me anything related to my code or thought process.

I don't know what they were trying to evaluate. The interviews were very peculiar compared to other companies.

Phone screen:

What is the singleton pattern? Code an example of the singleton pattern. What are its use cases?

Algorithmic question related to sparse arrays.

Coding: Tree traversal in recursive and iterative ways.

Design: Marketplace-kind of a feature on an e-commerce website. Send notifications to merchants.

Write a Spark job.

Hit an API on the internet, get data, and put it in a CSV file.