Sharing my recent interview experience, hopefully it helps folks interviewing later avoid the same landmine.
Phone Screen:
Coding: Design a social media feed, Part 1 and Part 2. I didn't fully finish it, but I talked through my remaining approach.
System Design: Sora. The interviewer pressed on some details, including why I chose AWS SQS and how to handle various failure cases.
Virtual Onsite:
BQ + Tech Deep Dive: This round felt great overall — we were laughing and joking with the interviewer, pretty relaxed atmosphere.
Coding: Infectious disease problem. I finished Parts 1 through 3, and wrote Part 4 too, but there was a bug in the code. In the end I ran out of time to fix it and had to give up.
System Design: Payment. I'm not that familiar with this domain, but I still tried to lay out everything I knew and my design approach.
After the virtual onsite wrapped up, I thought I could finally just wait for the result — but instead they told me I needed an extra round.
The extra round was, hands down, the worst part of the whole process. The interviewer gave me a "Building a Terraform" problem — a type I'd never seen before. What made it worse wasn't the problem itself, but that the interviewer gave almost no feedback the entire time.
I worked on it based on my own understanding for about 30 minutes. They never gave me a hint and never pointed out that I was going in the wrong direction. After I'd been writing for a long while, they suddenly said, "This doesn't feel right, try it again."
I was honestly speechless. If they thought my direction was wrong, they could have said something earlier — instead they waited 30 minutes before telling me to scrap it and start over, and there wasn't nearly enough time left to redo it.
Honestly, I had prepared the common interview questions really thoroughly — I'd gone through them over and over. But of course the extra round threw a question at me that I'd never seen before, and it completely threw me off. Getting an unfamiliar question is one thing, but the interviewer giving zero feedback the whole time, then telling me after 30 minutes that my direction was wrong and making me start over — that really messed with my head.
Overall, aside from this last extra round, the other rounds went pretty well and the interviewers were reasonable. Unfortunately I got hit hard by the interviewer in that extra round and ended up failing, no way around it.
Hope this write-up helps others interviewing later. This is my first time posting an interview experience — wishing everyone can avoid landmine interviewers and land your offers!
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