A recruiter reached out to me and asked about my background. I had originally applied for Software Engineer II, as I had over three years of experience. However, the recruiter lowered it to one year because she believed I did not have enough experience with scaling enterprise-level systems.

My first interview round was with an engineer. I was asked a behavioral question, followed by a LeetCode hard problem afterward. The difficulty was huge from the get-go. You really need to prep for months to have a decent shot. I ground LeetCode for just three weeks and was destroyed as a result.

Tell me a time that you were set up to fail.

Solve this impossible LeetCode Hard problem that involves figuring out an algorithm that can crack any RSA encryption in O(1) time.

All jokes aside, it was a question about topological sorting. You have to find managers and employees given a list of their names and IDs and print them out in a sideways pyramid.