I applied online and received a request for a phone interview approximately two weeks later. I scheduled the interview, but the recruiting coordinator did not reply for another two weeks, at which point they informed me they had moved on to other candidates. The same recruiter then contacted me again, asking for my availability for a phone interview as if nothing had happened. I provided dates again, and after a significant delay, they offered some alternative dates, which I accepted immediately.

The phone round was technical. The engineer conducted it well, showing patience and providing helpful hints. After the phone round, I didn't hear back for about four weeks. I sent an email inquiring about the status, and they scheduled the onsite interview two weeks after that.

The onsite interview consisted of five rounds.

The first round was with a manager who seemed disinterested and lacked enthusiasm. They asked about my background, followed by questions on C++ and REST, and then asked me to write an algorithm to find the intersection node between two linked lists.

The next round was a lunch interview, scheduled for an hour and fifteen minutes. The interviewer engaged in casual conversation about my background and projects. After lunch, the discussion about projects continued, and I was asked to write the complete code to evaluate an infix expression containing *, +, -, /. There were many digressions during this time, which I found disruptive.

The third round was with an engineer via video call. They began directly with a technical question: coding a producer-consumer scenario where each producer creates one item and each consumer consumes one item. The constraint was that synchronization could not use blocking primitives like semaphores or condition variables, implying lock-free programming. The engineer's behavior was disrespectful and made me uncomfortable. There were several other questions, most of which I did not answer. This interview left a bad impression.

I took a five-minute break before the next interview, which was a data structure design question concerning trees. The interviewer was good and helpful, and I felt I performed well in this round.

The final round was with the hiring manager, focusing on an overview of the product and answering my questions.

I received the offer two days after the interviews.

Phone Interview:

External sorting algorithms. Various approaches to sorting data present on different machines.

Onsite:

Round 1:

• Default function generated in C++, some questions on copy constructor
• What is Idempotency?
• Difference between PUT and POST in REST. When to use one over the other
• Find intersection node in linked list

Round 2:

• Evaluate an infix expression. Also had to identify the adapter design pattern to solve one of the issues with the code

Round 3:

• Producer-Consumer problem in a non-blocking way
• Issues while transferring data between 32-bit and 64-bit machines
• Some questions on resume projects

Round 4:

• Design a tree which can contain any number of children. Implement create(parentid, childid) and find(nodeid). Constraints: No duplicate key, tree depth cannot exceed certain threshold d