Warner Bros.

Role: Senior Software Engineer

College: B.Tech CSE Tier 3 college

Interview Date: July 2024

Interview Type: Full-Time

Result: Offer Accepted

Difficulty: Medium

Rounds: 4 rounds

Topics Asked: Data Structures, Algorithms, Java Streams, CI/CD, Deployments, Testing, Production Support, System Design (Instagram News Feed), Database Schema, APIs, Scaling

Experience:

This candidate interviewed for a Senior Software Engineer position at Warner Bros & Discovery in Hyderabad and received an offer.

Round 1 (Coding): This round involved two coding questions. The first was "Find kth Most Frequent Element" (similar to LeetCode's Top K Frequent Elements), where the candidate provided the approach and explained time complexity without coding. The second was "Search in a Sorted Rotated Array" (LeetCode Medium). There was also a question on Java Streams and Collectors. The interviewer was satisfied.

Round 2 (Coding): This round also had two coding questions: "Coin Change" and "Spiral Matrix" (both typically LeetCode Medium).

Round 3 (Operational and Engineering Excellence Round): This round focused on practical engineering and operational aspects. Questions included:

• How would you design a CI/CD framework and handle deployments?
• Describe different types of testing before pushing code to production.
• Discuss code analysis tools used in your current application.
• How to handle production issues, including setting up alerts?
• Describe a past production issue and its resolution.
• Measures to minimize production issues (P0, P1 flows, feature flags).
• How to ensure important features are always working?
• Have you set up meetings with business in case of issues?
• How would you scale an application (proactive monitoring, autoscaling, alerts for memory/CPU)?
• How to identify, tool, and fix memory/CPU spikes?

Round 4 (System Design Round): The system design problem was "Design Instagram News Feed." The requirements included users seeing posts of followed users and identifying followers for a user. The discussion covered schema design, database choices (S3 for images/videos, Postgres for user/post/follower info), and API design. Scaling issues were also discussed.

Result: The candidate received and accepted an offer.