I'm a mid-level engineer with roughly 3-4 years of experience, almost all of it in backend work, mostly distributed systems at fintech companies. I went to a state school and did just one internship during college.
Asana hands candidates a study guide, and I'd tell anyone to work through it, even if they're interviewing somewhere else. Most of my own studying was the video lessons and quizzes from an online prep course. On top of that I leaned on more senior engineers I know and asked them for a ton of mock interviews, and I really do mean a ton. Watching the people in those videos felt smooth and great, but when it was me doing the talking I'd trip over my words even though I knew the patterns. So the real thing I had to learn was explaining my thinking clearly while under pressure. I also went back over some LeetCode, but in hindsight I would have put more time into design questions, both low-level design and system design, because they showed up a lot across the whole process. For the coding side, I'd focus on writing clean, well-structured code and knowing the common data structures really well, since some questions call for unconventional approaches. I did a lot of design prep too. One thing surprised me: before the main problem of a round, they sneak in a brain-teaser or a small LeetCode-style question. It threw me off a bit, though none of them was harder than a medium.
My advice to other engineers is to give yourself enough time to get through the study guide, and to schedule your interviews so that you actually have that time. The recruiters were great and very flexible about it. I'd also say to concentrate on getting your ideas across and keeping the interviewer with you the whole way. They seem to care more about what you say and the ideas you come up with than about the code you write, with the exception of the coding round.
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