I recently had a screening interview with a recruiter. During this session, I was asked to solve a problem in TDD style via screenshare.

I encountered some difficulty with the syntax of a testing library, and the interviewer and I collaborated to find a solution. Despite this, the interviewer indicated that they received a positive signal and that a retake was unnecessary.

The second interview involved two engineers from the hiring team. It included:

• A coding question focused on transactions and thread safety.
• A discussion on various topics, such as software architecture, scalability, and how databases work under the hood.

Although I felt I performed well during the interviews, I received a rejection email the next day. I never received feedback on my performance, despite explicitly asking for it.

Unfortunately, this period in my personal life was not the brightest, and I believe it may have affected my interview process. Reflecting on the interviews, I think the reason for rejection may have been my overly opinionated, but not thoroughly explained, answers.

Despite all of that, I enjoyed the sessions, as it felt like a nice tech discussion rather than a torturous question-and-answer interview.

How can we scale a banking system beyond RDBMS replication capacity?