Looking back, I’m relieved it’s over — the interviews were tougher than I expected.

The process kicked off with a technical screen that was brutal; they asked me to design a metadata service for columnar storage and discuss sharding strategies. I had practiced a similar scenario on prachub.com just a week before, and it helped a lot.

The final round was filled with complex system design questions that left me drained. Ultimately, I received an offer, but the overall experience didn’t align with what I was looking for, so I declined.

Design a metadata service that tracks micro-partitions for a columnar storage engine handling petabyte-scale tables.

Walk through how you'd:

• Shard the metadata across nodes
• Handle concurrent table updates without locking entire partitions
• Prune partitions during query planning using min/max statistics

Then implement the in-memory pruning index in code, including how to merge per-column statistics after a background compaction job rewrites partitions.