Target Senior Software Engineer interview questions

1. Interview with a member walking through resume, technologies used, why used Kafka for this usecase , how does horizontal autoscaling work etc. Good experience. 2. Pair Programming - Fix a buggy program and write a testcase to detect cycle in a graph. Went well, collaborative. 3. Interview with Hiring manager and another member - Similar to first interview - walking through existing product, various technologies used. Interview was scheduled for 45 mins, the interviewer asked me to design Uber when 10 mins was left without whiteboard or tools. Ended up 20 mins overtime. 4. Interview with 2 team members - One person did not show up and the other interviewer asked system design questions, spent 10 mins talking about why github forking should be reserved for open source projects when I mentioned forking is my preference. Asked me to write code for summing up numbers in an array when 5 mins was left - again no hackerrank or tool. Had to write it in zoom. Went 15 mins overtime.

The process was way too long, and could have easily been done panel style instead of setting aside 4 hours of back to back interviews. All of the interviews were bullet pointy, stuff around OOP. All of the interviewers were generally pretty nice, but only one of them felt like an actual conversation. My one major issue was that at the end they determined I was somewhere middle ground between a mid-range engineer and a senior. So, if given this position, they would not be able to offer me the Senior title and in turn, the salary I requested (and currently receiving). Even though the position/work would have been the same, they didn’t want to “set me up for failure”. Which seemed a little ridiculous for a huge company to be nit picking over $10,000. Also burned a little because an old colleague of mine with almost identical experience was given the benefit of the doubt within that company and received the Senior title about 6 months before I applied and interviewed, but was a man, so take from that what you will. As for the technical interviews, just a few gripes with one particular interviewer. In one scenario he was asking about my resume having “database migration” and asking what data I migrated, and responded saying I was referring to flyway database migrations (and offered a brief explanation), and then again asked what data I migrated. Same interviewer also asked if I had a high api load what type of db I would chose, relational or nosql, to which I responded how that is not the only criteria I would use to chose, and listed what else I would need and where my decision would go based off that. Then proceeded to ask me the same question again, clearly fishing for a direct answer. All in all, he seemed like he wanted me to fill the standardized test bubble, instead of listening for my technical competency within my answer.