I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks.

It was a good experience overall. The whole process was smooth and fast. The recruiter was very responsive whenever I had questions. There were four stages:

• Intro with the recruiter.
• HackerRank. This tests array manipulation, making HTTP calls using Java, MySQL (knowing basic select, join, order, and group by), and other MCQ questions based on data structures and algorithms.
• Interview with a Senior Engineer: a lot of questions on Java, Database, Spring Boot, authentication methods, OOP principles, REST principles, and the basics of distributed systems. I used blogs with interview questions, but I eventually switched to ChatGPT. I would ask the LLM to generate the top 20 interview questions. I would fill in the answers, submit them back to ChatGPT, and let it rate and correct me. I think I did appreciably well, and at least I got an offer.
• Interview with an Engineering Manager: this is very similar to the third step, but you might be required to go in-depth into any of the topics. Also, behavioral questions that might feel a bit uncomfortable can come here, like why you are switching jobs. For me, that's a very uncomfortable question. You can't tell if you are meant to be diplomatic or raw. Of course, you shouldn't lie, but you should present your reason well. You must understand debugging techniques.

List OOP principles and explain them. Explain REST principles. Talk about garbage collection and the latest garbage collection in the JVM. Talk about databases, and go into details about document and RDBMS...