Referred by a friend working in the company,
A recruiter will schedule a phone call with you to know your background and your expectations.
Next, there will be 3 technical rounds, 2 with senior engineers, 1 with a tech lead. The funny this in all of this interview is they don't want you to introduce yourself normally, they just want you said what is your tech stack in 1 sentence then they will start asking their questions. I guess this is because of their English is not so good so it hard for them to discuss your background in a verbose manner.
The first 2 technical rounds were very challenging to me. Here is a breakdown of these interviews:
- Background work: the interviewer will look at your CV and pick out a technology that you said you used and ask about it. This is normal, the this that I didn't expect is the depth of these questions. E.g internal mechanism of Elastic Search, exactly one implementation of Kafka, etc.
- Coding: there will be 1 coding question where they share you a code share to type. The question itself is medium and the interviewers did guide you through the process.
- Fundamental questions: Interviewers will ask you a list of questions on various topics. The topics they covered are very wide, you need to revise all of this topic beforehand in order to have a chance of passing these interviews. The topics range from Networking, Database, OS.
The last technical round is with a Tech Lead, for some reason this round is significantly easier compared to the last 2 rounds. But a few of my friends said for them this is the most difficult round, so I guess it varies from team to team.
I received an offer a few days later via a phone call. There is no culture or product interview.
Overall experience:
- Recruiter is friendly and sincere, I can feel she really trying to facilitate to match my offers.
- Interviewers are also friendly, their English is not so good, but they did try to communicate so I can feel that they will be easy to work with. They also demonstrate a strong and deep technical capability base on the discussion we had during the interview.
Unluckily, I didn't accept the offer at the end.