Had an interview with the HM that went quite well and then a coding screen with an engineer who barely spoke English and wasn't very responsive. The question itself was just an LC Medium but it was hard to communicate. Interviewer also said they got popular and grew active users overnight, and the teams were struggling to keep up with the demand and scale.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
LC Med. Nothing Chat GPT can't solve. But I obviously didn't use it, otherwise I'd have passed.
The phone screen was surprisingly brief, lasting only about 20 minutes but focused heavily on technical concepts. I was asked to design a distributed rate limiter for an LLM inference API, which I had practiced on PracHub during my prep. The technical rounds that followed were more in-depth, delving into system design and behavioral questions, but the earlier prep really paid off. In the end, I received an offer, which I decided to decline as I felt it wasn’t the right fit for me.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a distributed rate limiter for an LLM inference API
The process is intense and highly focused on practical engineering rather than just theoretical algorithms. After the initial recruiter screen and a technical phone screen, there was a heavy emphasis on a "Learning Sample" or a take-home style project that you then have to defend in a deep-dive session. They want to see how you handle real-world system bottlenecks, concurrency, and large-scale data ingestion.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
One part involved optimizing a distributed system mockup where I had to identify a race condition under high load. It wasn't about memorizing a textbook answer; it was about live debugging and showing your thought process in a production-like environment.
The interview process took a few weeks in total. First there was an initial phone screening, then two technical interviews, and then a final day with 3 interviews. Entire process felt smooth and professional
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Final round had behavioral, project presentation, and general leetcode-esque question