I applied to a batch of Salesforce positions around the end of September, but the interview I ended up getting was not one of the ones I applied to. They automatically assigned me to this position and sent me a notice for a 30-minute interview. I looked up the interviewer's name, and he is a Director who has been at Salesforce for 11 years, which is a very senior position.
Right at the start he introduced his team and the job. He thought I had already done a screening with HR, but this was actually the first round. He asked me about things on my resume. Cloud, Terraform and CI/CD were what he was most interested in, since those are close to the projects and experience his team has. He spent more time on those questions and asked whether I had actually implemented things, for example how I would implement a rate limiter. I hadn't prepared a rate limiter. I know how to do it, but I had never actually built one. What I told him was that we used AWS WAF, which has its own API rate limiter. But that is not what they wanted. He wanted a rate limiter for CI jobs, and when I thought about it afterwards, the correct answer should have been a token bucket rate limiter. I don't think I answered that question well. On top of that, he asked another one: when we updated our API server, how did we update its database credentials? I forgot how we did it at the time. I remember we encrypted the database credentials and then put them into the AWS Lambda environment variables, and the code inside the Lambda decrypted the credentials with its key. That sounds like a roundabout way to do it, but I had forgotten that this was our actual approach, so I told him we just put the credentials directly in the source code. He probably eliminated me because of that.
The biggest takeaway for me is that when you apply to a big company, no matter which position you apply for, you can get an interview for a different position. Compared with applying to small companies, that adds a lot of interview chances. So if you are looking for a job, focus on big companies. Small companies may actually be more competitive, because everyone has heard of them, like Figma or Notion. They open very few positions, they don't have this kind of internal matching, and you usually need a referral to get an interview.
Of the six big-company interviews I've had, three came from this kind of matching, so applying to big companies gives you the better chance.
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