Nouveau

Sharing my experience since I found Reddit posts super helpful during prep. YOE: \~5 years Location: India Currently working at a product-based company. Screening Round (1 hr) One DSA + some discussion around approach and optimizations. Problem: Sliding window based (longest substring with at most k distinct characters type). Follow-ups around edge cases and improving space usage. DSA Round 2 questions, both medium. Implement LRU Cache (O(1) get/put). Follow-ups on why hashmap + doubly linked list, and edge cases. Merge overlapping intervals. Discussion around sorting complexity and in-place modifications. LLD Round Design a Parking Lot system. Started with requirements → clarified assumptions → then moved to class diagram. Interviewer pushed on SOLID principles and how design changes if requirements evolve. System Design Round Design a Notification System (push + email) for large scale. They were more interested in how I think rather than expecting a perfect architecture. Managerial Round Standard senior-level questions. They went deep into impact. Numbers help here. Timeline Got feedback in about 8–10 days. Offer discussion happened after that. Final offer: 29 LPA. Prep Strategy DSA: Focused on patterns instead of random grinding. Sliding window, trees, LRU, graphs, binary search. Mostly medium-level. LLD: Practiced common problems like Parking Lot, Splitwise, Elevator. Focused on clean OOP and extensibility. System Design: Followed a structured approach: Requirements → APIs → DB → Components → Scaling → Tradeoffs → Bottlenecks. Practiced explaining designs out loud. That helped more than just watching videos. Behavioural: Prepared STAR format stories for leadership, conflict, failure, ownership. Content I followed: 1. Gaurav Sen system design videos. 2. ByteByteGo concepts for basics. 3. Resume Skool System Design Guide. 4. Took a few paid mocks at Resume Skool (especially for system design and DSA). The feedback was blunt and realistic.