My road to a Salesforce MTS offer started in Asia. I began as an intern back home and moved up to Senior Software Engineer there. After that I co-founded a startup and stayed with it until 2022.
Then I moved to the U.S. and could not legally work at first because of my work authorization. I did not want to just sit around, so I used the gap on myself. I did an MS in Computer Science through Georgia Tech's online program (OMSCS) and spent the time going back over my fundamentals.
After that came the grind. I sent applications to hundreds of roles and got rejected over and over, but I picked up something from each rejection. I reworked my resume, got better at telling my own stories, and sharpened how I think about system design. In the end the offer came. What set me apart from everyone else was simply that I did not quit.
How I prepared
What worked: preparing for the specific company. I went after the questions that company is known for instead of grinding random LeetCode.
For coding, I paid for LeetCode Premium, filtered by the company's questions from the last 6 months, and did a very intense 30 to 45 day stretch on them.
For system design, I took an online course with deep dives and premium material. I practiced stating trade-offs out loud in a clear way, and I concentrated on distributed systems, scalability and cloud basics.
I also read through Reddit threads, Discord groups, Blind and other people's past interview write-ups. Knowing the patterns helped me far more than solving problems at random.
What did not work: doing lots of random LeetCode problems with no focus, and spending effort on obscure topics when I should have been mastering the basics. Targeted prep beats scattered prep.
The interview process
This is how it went for me. First a recruiter screen, then an interview with the hiring manager, then two technical virtual interviews that focused on cloud, the domain, and security.
The onsite had two parts. One was system design. The other was coding, and that one caught me off guard. The recruiter had told me it would be 15 minutes of OOP and 15 minutes of LeetCode-style questions. What actually happened was about 30 minutes of behavioral questions, followed by a LeetCode Hard problem. So prepare for more than what they describe to you, and expect it to change.
Advice for anyone preparing
Look into the questions the company actually asks. Message people on Reddit or Discord who interviewed there recently. If you are short on time, go for targeted prep over general DSA. Be solid on the fundamentals, meaning OOP, concurrency basics and thinking in terms of distributed systems. Rehearse your behavioral answers until you can give them clearly and with confidence. Have a structured way to walk through a system design.
Most of all, a rejection is information, not a ruling on you. This whole thing tested my patience a lot more than it tested my coding. If you are in the middle of the grind right now, keep going, because one yes is enough to change everything. Good luck to everyone preparing.
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