Round 1 (Exploratory Discussion)
Questions:
- Was asked about my past experiences, SDLC followed in my current company, and high-level design discussions.
- Coding Problem: Check if a string exists in a circular string.
Candidate's Approach
No approach provided.
Interviewer's Feedback
No feedback provided.
Round 2 (DSA)
Questions:
- Climbing Stairs
- Given a sudoku with some empty spots, check if it is valid.
Candidate's Approach
No approach provided.
Interviewer's Feedback
No feedback provided.
Round 3 (Design)
Questions:
- Discussed the architecture of my current project.
- Design Problem: Design a URL shortener.
- Discussed Back of the Envelope estimations, API contract, database design, and high-level design for efficiently generating random unique short URLs.
- Discussed sharding the database for efficient queries.
- Interviewer asked about LRU cache implementation since I had mentioned caching in my design.
Candidate's Approach
No approach provided.
Interviewer's Feedback
No feedback provided.
Round 4 (Infrastructure Round)
Questions:
- Questions related to cloud platforms, CI/CD, and Kubernetes.
Candidate's Approach
No approach provided.
Interviewer's Feedback
No feedback provided.
Verdict: Rejected
The whole process took more than a month. They would have conducted 2 more rounds (Hiring Manager and Bar Raiser) if the feedback had been positive. Hope this helps anyone preparing for Hotstar interviews.