Posting to share my interview experience with a different team on the Ads side, hoping it brings me some luck. It's been two weeks since I finished interviewing and I've been ghosted — no message at all from HR, so it's probably just gone into a black hole.
First, I asked if I could interview for Staff, but HR firmly said no, telling me that an outside L6 is an L5 here, and that I'd have a chance to do L6-level work anyway, so no need to worry about it, haha.
The OA round was a versioned KV store, similar to what other companies ask. The interviewer was quite nice and seemed to have been in this domain for a long time — right off the bat he said since I also work on ads, why not build it as an ads data store instead. So I talked and coded at the same time, mentioning some common ads operations I could think of, and we had a pretty good conversation. I coded slowly but still passed. Two days after the OA I got the onsite invite.
The onsite had four rounds, and none of them matched what's posted on the forum:
The coding round was probably the closest to the posted experiences — topological sort, but with a DP-like constraint added on top, where you had to handle when each prerequisite actually finishes. A variant I hadn't seen before. I didn't get this part fully right — the interviewer gave me a hint and I understood the edge case, but I didn't finish fixing the bug in time.
The system design round wasn't freq cap either, it was pacing. I knew this at a high level so I answered with roughly the same logic. I'll admit there were parts I didn't deep dive into, like how rate limiting is actually implemented, but the interviewer didn't press me on it — I brought it up myself, and the follow-up questions were pretty general too, so I don't think this round is much of a reference for anyone else.
The domain round also wasn't about demand, it was about the supply side — how to manage publisher-specific config rules. Since I've always worked on the demand side, my mind blanked for a second, and I spent a good while clarifying the question before I could even start. Part of my answer probably didn't line up with what the interviewer was looking for, which was how to model inventory.
By this point I was already pretty resigned to it. The two behavioral rounds asked fairly general questions, and I tried my best to steer my answers toward a match anyway.
After that, no more news at all. On the Monday of the second week after my onsite, the whole company was notified of a hiring freeze, so I'm just moving on for now.
I can't give any more specific details than this — with this exact set of questions, people would probably figure out who I am right away.
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