Process Overview:
The process started with an online assessment on HackerRank consisting of two medium-level coding problems. After passing, I was invited to a Super Day – four hours of back-to-back interviews split across three rounds with only short breaks in between.
Round 1 – Coding + Code Review (approx. 1 hour)
The round had two parts. The first part was a code review exercise: I was given a pull request and asked to identify issues as if reviewing a teammate’s code. This focused on Spring Boot best practices, security concerns (hardcoded credentials, password hashing), exception handling, and design principles like SRP. The second part was a LeetCode-style medium problem. The interviewer was engaged and gave hints when needed. Overall a fair round – time management is key here as the code review can eat into your DSA time if you’re not careful.
Round 2 – System Design (approx. 1 hour)
I was asked to design a URL shortener. The interviewer had a whiteboard-style setup on HackerRank. I followed a structured approach: clarified requirements, defined functional and non-functional requirements, discussed capacity estimation, designed the core components, defined key APIs, and talked through the database schema. The discussion went into scaling, caching strategy, and the trade-off between 301 and 302 redirects.
Round 3 – Behavioral