Job Location: Berlin, Germany.

All rounds were remote (Skype/Google Meet).

Round 1: Take-home coding round - 1 algorithm question, 1 SQL query.

Round 2: 15-minute video round - technical + going over resume.

Round 3: 1-hour technical live coding on CoderPad - 1 algorithm question + 10-15 SQL queries with difficulty levels ranging from basic (SELECT, PROJECT, MIN, MAX) to medium (JOINs, GROUP BY-HAVING).

Round 4: 4-hour video round (3 x 45 minutes + 15-minute break). Breakdown is as follows:

• Algorithm Design:
  • Standard questions, easy to medium. LeetCode practice helps a lot.
  • Code review. Good to know basic coding practices and architectural patterns, especially MVC, project folder setup, and Separation of Concerns.
• Database Design: Given a scenario, design its database with various tables and a variety of relationships. Once done with the design, you will be asked some questions pertaining to joins and sub-queries. Prepare this very well.
• Behavioral Round: This is basically to get to know the candidate better and how their previous experiences have been. Some questions about the role in the project, the team size, and the project life cycle, as well as Agile methodologies.
• System Design: Given a scenario, design the system (e.g., Parking Lot, URL Shortener, Chat Application). Only one will be asked. Major focus is on concepts of distributed systems, viz. scalability, load balancing, eventual consistency, ACID vs. BASE, relational vs. NoSQL DB, caching layer, and algorithms (e.g., LRU). Try to explain in easy words and then go for technical details.

Explain the LRU algorithm used in caching.

How to implement hashing?

Stocks Buy-Sell problem