Phone screen, 45 min: design a ticket-master system. We went deep on how to prevent double booking. The interviewer also cared a lot about UX — what the API returns, what seat map the frontend shows once it gets that response, etc.
Onsite: each round was 45 min. The email told me who the interviewer was and their title, but not which round would be system design vs. past-experience. It was scheduled in the afternoon, and there was no free lunch :(
I rushed over to the Bellevue office. No front desk, so I knocked on a door, grabbed the first person I saw, and told them I was here for an interview. Eventually I found the person hosting the interview, who turned out to be my first-round interviewer.
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After introducing myself, we talked about projects I'd worked on. Then naturally it turned into a technical deep dive at the whiteboard. The deep dive kept drifting — eventually it wasn't even about something I'd built anymore, it was about a framework used by another team. It basically turned into a system design interview, going deep on fault tolerance. I ended up stuck on how to prevent a Kafka consumer from double-consuming a batch, and honestly I'm not even sure I fully understood what we were deep-diving into by that point. My brain just shut off.
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This guy came extremely prepared — he'd printed out my resume and read it closely, more than one page, so he'd clearly done his homework beforehand. He asked about the projects he found interesting, asked about MCP, but didn't dig into ancient history from way earlier jobs. Then some behavioral questions — conflict, most proud project. Then system design: a reconciliation system. I had no idea what that was, so the interviewer explained it — you pull files from the bank, pull a list of transactions from a payment processor (e.g. Stripe), then reconcile that against existing orders to find mismatches. I just didn't have the domain knowledge for it. Totally lost.
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This one was probably the hiring manager, over Teams. We talked a bit about Temporal since I had it on my resume and his team also uses it. System design: something for processing remittance files. The interviewer explained clearly what a remittance file is — a file listing a bunch of transactions. For each transaction you need to enrich it, store it, and send a notification to the relevant person. Lots of follow-up on fault tolerance. This one went great.
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Brief chat about projects, talked about GraphQL. Then some random knowledge checks — like what happens when I open Google and start searching, what happens if Google's API gateway goes down, what DB would you use to store search engine results, what programming languages I've used, and the difference between a compiler and an interpreter. Then some whiteboard pseudocode: given a binary tree, if you set one node on fire, how long until the whole tree burns — basically the longest path in the tree. Didn't need to write out everything, just talk through the approach. This one also went great.
A lot of the interviewers mentioned this was the first in-person onsite they'd done in years. Overall the experience was good. The interviewers were happy to answer questions and gave detailed answers — what the team does, what's coming next, what Tesla's org structure looks like, how many layers are between them and Elon, whether the culture is top-down or bottom-up, how performance review works, what the tech stack is, who they normally work cross-functionally with, and what reorgs have happened before and why.
If there's one downside, it's that the path upward is basically blocked. I interviewed for a senior role, but every single interviewer — including the one who did the phone screen — was a staff engineer. This whole hiring org has an extremely high ratio of staff-level people.
Typed this all by hand, no AI polish.
And I'll leave you all with a line from a Mao Zedong poem, about how the triumphs and crimes of a thousand years are never really judged by anyone.
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