I applied for the Senior Data Engineer position at the Yerevan Office on July 26, 2023, and received a response on September 21, after two months (shocking). The response was from the recruitment coordinator, suggesting a technical interview on October 4th (no HR or screening was mentioned).

The technical interview went well. I felt I made a good impression. We mostly discussed Apache Spark and its internals, with some questions about distributed systems.

The next day, another recruiter reached out and asked when I was ready to complete a system design home assessment. After confirming I was okay, they sent the task with a two-week deadline. I did my best to complete it, producing a good solution, and submitted it after ten days.

A couple of days later, I received a standard message from the recruitment coordinator: "Unfortunately, at this time, we have decided to proceed with our interview process with another candidate. This is a decision we didn't make easily because you are a strong candidate with a wonderful personality."

Overall, my feedback is negative due to my pipe dream of working at a FANG-level company and spending too much time assuming everything was going well during this interview process.

Interestingly, the position remained open until the end of November and was even reposted on LinkedIn.

Which types of query optimization do I know in Spark, and how do they work internally?

How to make a join with two big datasets, if the joining condition is not strict (e.g., expected to hear about product joins and keeping only relevant rows).

Other in-depth questions about Spark Streaming internals, and big data technologies like Kafka, ZooKeeper, etc.