Initial Screening

Recruiter call (30–45 mins)

• High-level discussion of background, skills, and leadership experience.
• Questions on past projects, scope of ownership, and interest in leadership.
• Some companies check compensation expectations here.

Focus on architecture & scalability:

Designing a large-scale system (e.g., payment system, distributed cache, event-driven pipeline).

Expect to cover trade-offs:

• SQL vs. NoSQL
• Monolith vs. microservices
• Sync vs. async

Leadership layer:

You may also be asked how you would guide a team to implement this system.