Sde

Hi everyone, just wanted to share my interview experience at one of the big techs for SDE-2 position. For context, I have 2.5yoe as a sde in Fintech (bank) and location is India. Post clearing the OA I had 3 rounds with the team. First two were coding. The first round had leetcode easy and a medium question asked. The medium question was string decode where I gave two approaches verbally, stack and recursion, but couldn't complete the code (probably because extracting the number was the annoying part in the code) but I was confident that my approach was correct. Second round I was asked Single Number II, now bitset is something I didn't prepare for prior to the interview and I took several hints to find the trick. I coded the solution up but getting the hints sucked and probably the interview pressure got to me when he gave me the first hint on using bits logic. Anyways, felt low but somehow got called for round3. I had a weekend and I barely had any idea how LLD HLD goes on. I prepped rigorously for LLD but was unfortunately asked an HLD question. I only have fundamental concepts in HLD and was asked to design a notification service. I gave few wrong answers and needed help here. For ex, I said Rate Limiter will be placed before the load balancer 😭😭. Post interview I thought about it and this was obviously wrong. I did use basic ideas of caching, kafka etc... but definitely not sde-2 material. The interviewer started yawning mid interview. 🥲 I feel so dejected because I didn't know I was so out of prep. It's not like they asked super difficult question or anything, if only I had prepped consistently I would be a competitive candidate but unfortunately I wasn't consistent and wasn't prepped as a result. Don't have any other company interviewing me, but hopefully the next time I get an opportunity im prepped well enough. 🫡