A former colleague recommended me for the software engineer role, which led to a fairly involved interview loop.

After a phone screen, I had two algorithmic rounds, a system design, and a behavioral interview.

The coding question about a 2D board was a stroke of luck; I had just tackled a similar problem on PracHub while preparing.

The entire process took about six weeks, and while I received an offer, I ultimately chose to decline it.

Overall, it was a challenging experience, but I gained valuable insights.

Given a 2D board of letters and a list of words from a dictionary, return all words on the board that can be constructed from sequentially adjacent cells (horizontally or vertically), where the same letter cell may not be used more than once in a word.

Design a backend service that returns the top-K most viewed YouTube videos in a rolling 24-hour window at planet-scale traffic, including how you would shard counters and reconcile approximate vs exact counts.