The hardest round for me involved designing a full-stack web application in React and Node.js. I had to write frontend and backend code and cover API design in about two hours. Everything felt tightly timed. Coordinating the architecture from end to end added to the pressure of writing the code.
Another technical session lasted three hours. The first half was technical and the second was behavioral, with two software development engineers. Questions covered which data structures fit particular projects, logging-style LeetCode problems, a curly-brace coding challenge and modern C++. The behavioral part included how I'd respond if my implementation turned out to be more efficient than a supervisor's.
I also went through a deep technical discussion of Transformers and agentic AI. I was expected to understand the math behind a Transformer well enough to reason through it, and I managed to get through. A hiring-manager conversation about my projects went smoothly afterward. The principal-engineer round was more intense, with focused follow-ups, repeated questions and pressure to solve problems without relying on LLM-style approaches.
In that last example, I didn't advance. The feedback felt abrupt: they said I didn't meet an AI requirement that hadn't come up earlier. I didn't feel the interview had exposed a gap in my core C++ skills. That mismatch stayed with me. The interviews had been brutally demanding, yet the final decision seemed to hinge on something outside what I'd actually been asked to demonstrate.
Location: India. Overall feedback: neutral. Offer status: no offer.
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