I applied online. The process took 3 weeks.

The first interview was a video call with an engineer who asked me a bit about my experience and then we started discussing problems and solutions on distributed systems. It was very conversational, and the interviewer was really good at diving a bit deeper into certain topics where I had more experience. I demonstrated my understanding based on actual hands-on experience and examples from previous jobs.

Passing that round, I then opted to do the take-home project and code review call. I spent around 4 to 6 hours on the code. In the review call, I pointed out things I had learned and some interesting features that were fun to implement. We discussed how the code might be extended to improve the throughput and how it might be adjusted to be more resilient to failure.

I then did a system design interview round. It was not a system I had seen before in my preparation, but I was able to discuss requirements, high-level design, scaling out, and possible improvements. The interviewer was really good at making me feel relaxed, gave real-time feedback on my design choices, and prompted me to think about some of them when I was drifting out of scope.

After this round, I participated in a behavioural interview with two engineers. Some of the questions were difficult to answer on the spot, as always with these types of interviews, but I just answered honestly. Again, the interviewers were really friendly and very interested in my previous experience, and they made it a relaxed discussion.

All interviews were remote, via video call, with the camera on.

Talk about race conditions in the context of database transactions, and possible mitigations and solutions to problems in this domain.

How would you improve the throughput of your take-home project? How would you scale it?

Describe how you would make your system design more resilient and fault-tolerant.