I received a call from a recruiter who had found my profile suitable on LinkedIn. There was no discussion of remuneration at this stage. I received a briefing on the role and expectations.

Next, I had three telephonic screening rounds. The first was mostly focused on Java and distributed systems, covering garbage collection and memory leaks. The second was primarily about logical problem-solving and the application of design patterns. The third round discussed my prior experience and architectural approaches.

I then had a full-day, in-person discussion at their campus. I believe I went through five discussions. Broadly, they consisted of:

• Architecting a distributed load balancer
• Hadoop/MapReduce and ZooKeeper usage
• Discussion around single points of failure (SPOFs) in my earlier architectures and how they were addressed
• Developing code for a read-write (RW) lock with fairness incorporated
• B+Tree indexes and contention (Oracle indexing)
• Row lock contention in Oracle, etc.
• Non-blocking I/O (NBIO)
• TCP RST issues
• Designing a full-fledged web server
• Some general questions on data structure usage and how I have incorporated them

Developing code for an RWLock and asking me to make changes to it (incorporating fairness or priority, for example).