I went through 5 interview rounds.

• 1st round (video call, general web-tech questions, 1 hour): The interviewer was a senior lead developer who asked questions on almost everything related to web development technologies, a few problem-solving questions, and questions on deployment tools. He was helpful during the interview but seemed to be in a hurry. The interview went well enough.

• 2nd round (video call, system design, 45 min): As far as I remember, the interviewer asked me to design a URL shortener service. It went really well.

• 3rd round (in office, front-end, 30-45 mins): The interviewer was a lead full-stack developer named Bharat. Questions were mostly on ReactJS, focusing on how it works internally rather than feature implementations. My answers were so in-depth that they went over the interviewer's head, and he started interrupting me every 20 seconds. Result: The interviewer wasn't impressed and possibly felt his ego was hurt.

• 4th round (in office, in-depth system design): Design a highly utilized, low-latency, multi-region URL shortener and explain every system in depth. I designed and explained the entire system so well that it could have been recorded and used as an educational video. However, I had to alter my initial approach as I delved into the details and encountered bottlenecks. Result: It was phenomenal, but I'm unsure if the interviewer was impressed. It went over the 1-hour mark. The interviewer genuinely enjoyed the discussion and stated it was the most detailed explanation of that question he had ever heard.

• 5th round (in office, problem solving): The interviewer was a back-end (Python) developer, likely in data science. The question involved finding the optimal approach for a river crossing puzzle given a list of people's weights in random order. The interviewer expected the answer to be O(n) complexity. He provided hints for sorting the array in O(n) complexity for this specific question; the rest of the solution was straightforward.

Total result: Never heard back, not even feedback.

I don't know what they were expecting from the candidate. Others have pointed out that the company is simply conducting interviews without an actual desire to hire, and that is my impression too.

Questions on web-development technologies, tools, system design, and problem-solving.