I applied through a staffing agency. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Dgraph Labs (Bengaluru) in Jul 2020
Interview
Overall, it was a good experience. The interview process was quite slow to start with but rocketed to completion later.
There was a Hackerrank test for initial screening. To be very honest, I missed the date which I communicated for the test completion by a couple of days. But once I submitted the test, there was no follow up for around 10-12 days (I thought that the feedback might be negative).
Then one day, I got a call to schedule my interview rounds. I was already serving my notice period, I needed to complete the process very quickly.
I really liked the fact that sensing the urgency, the process was expedited. I had my 4 rounds (3 Technical Rounds + 1 Culture Fit Round) and the offer was rolled out. And all of it was completed within a week. They covered up for all the lost time.
Kudos to the recruitment team for that!
Interview questions [4]
Question 1
Round 1: Given a directory/folder with N files and each file has M entries (key: value) that are sorted by key within each file. What is the best approach that can be used to search a given key within the directory/folder?
Round 2: Given a URL for a webpage. You need to crawl the webpage and then crawl subsequent links that are available on the webpage and keep doing that recursively until you crawl all the links. What is the strategy you would devise to solve this?
Round 3: Given an array and a function (that needs to be applied to each element of the array) as input. What is the fastest way to apply that function on to the array and return the new array?
Round 4: This was a 2-hour long session. Dgraph focuses a lot on this round and it was actually great. For the first time, I got a chance to introspect into my career right from a college fresher to date. There were detailed questions for each of the roles/responsibilities I held in my career.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 days. I interviewed at Dgraph Labs (San Francisco, CA) in May 2022
Interview
(1.) I interviewed with the new team at Dgraph for a position on their Engineering team. I do have 10+yrs of experience in my domain, and I found their interview process to be smooth & well structured (despite being a startup).
(2.) The interview was spread over multiple days - mostly because of my schedule. The company was very accommodating to my request. They are flexible & can morph their timelines accordingly to make it convenient to the candidate. They don't rush you or stress you out.
(3.) They emphasize on providing a good candidate experience during the interviews.
(4.) I had about ~5 rounds, where I met with engineers at all levels. It was good to get a full overview of their current problems, and map my skills to their needs.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
[A.] Questions =>
(1.) Describe past projects?
(2.) Deep dive into past projects?
(3.) Detailed interview into SRE, DevOps processes, ZeroTrust Security, Infrastructure & Backend Architecture.
(4.) Some high-level Qs on DB concepts
(5.) Focus on your system design, be practical in your solutions.
[C.] Soft Skills =>
There was also a deep assessment into culture fit. I could sense every interviewer subtly focusing on culture fit. They do vet for culture fit in parallel to technical vetting.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Dgraph Labs in Jan 2021
Interview
First was a standard resume screening, followed by a HackerRank test (3 coding questions). After that shortlisting happened followed by 2 rounds of hands on coding and gradually making the code concurrent and parallel. Last round was a cultural fit round followed by reference reviews and offer.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Questions are designed around concurrency and optimisations. Be well versed in what situations could lead to bottlenecks and how they can be solved.
