Warner Bros.

Role: Senior Backend Engineer

College: Not Specified

Interview Date: April 2025

Interview Type: Full-Time

Result: Rejected

Difficulty: Medium-Hard

Rounds: 3 rounds

Topics Asked: Data Structures, Algorithms, System Design, CI/CD, Testing, Production Issue Handling, AWS

Experience:

This candidate shared their experience for a Senior Backend Engineer role at Warner Bros Discovery. The overall process involved three main rounds after an initial HR screening.

HR Screening: The initial call with a recruiter from a consultancy involved basic HR questions such as expected salary, current package, offer amounts, notice period, etc.

Round 1 (Technical/Coding): This round involved two coding questions. The first was "Search in Rotated Sorted Array" (LeetCode Medium), for which the candidate used a binary search approach. The second question was "Check if Rows and Columns are Equal in a Matrix or Not," which also involved finding a minimum time complexity solution. The candidate felt this round went well.

Round 2 (Operational and Engineering Excellence): This round focused on practical engineering scenarios. Questions included:

• Explain your current projects, especially recent ones.
• Discuss any code analysis tools used in your current application.
• Which services do you use in AWS (specifically mentioned CDA and S3)? What do they mean and what is their purpose?
• Have you ever set up or used a CI/CD pipeline?
• Describe different types of testing you would conduct before pushing code to production.
• If there's a memory or CPU spike in the application, how would you identify it, what tools would you use, and how would you fix it?
• How do you handle production issues and generate alerts?
• How do you handle requests if a server goes down?
• How do you record daily logged-in users?

The candidate felt this round did not go as well, especially the latter half, which contributed to the rejection.

Round 3 (System Design): The system design question was to "Design a Top 10 Trending Shows for an OTT platform." The candidate followed a standard system design approach, starting with functional and non-functional requirements, then discussing required components, database module design, database structure, and APIs. Despite initial apprehension, the candidate felt this round went very well.

Result and Feedback: The candidate was rejected, and the recruiter provided feedback that they hadn't worked on "customer-facing projects," which was a key requirement for the position.