Software Engineer (E4) Interview Experience

Can you walk me through your previous experience, the tech stack you worked in, and your domain knowledge?

I walked through the kind of work I had done before, the tech stack I had worked in, and the domain knowledge I had. It felt like a normal alignment call to see whether my background matched what they needed.

I explained how I use AI in day-to-day engineering work as a practical productivity tool. It was not super deep, but they clearly wanted to know whether I already use it in a real workflow.

Are you okay with relocation?

I answered the standard logistics questions around relocation and similar basics. Nothing tricky there.

Given dasher activity timestamps, calculate the payout for the day based on the delivery-time formula.

I had to write the whole program myself, not just complete a helper function. The problem was about a delivery partner's activities, like when an order was accepted and when it was fulfilled, and there was a formula for how much payout should be given for the time spent delivering across the day. So I handled the input parsing and the core logic end to end. I think that part catches people because even syntax and basic I/O matter here.

Run the provided test cases on this round robin implementation and find the bugs.

I ran the three or four test cases against a small round robin code snippet and fixed a few minor bugs. The issues were things like indexing not being done correctly and assignment to the list not being done correctly. It was pretty straightforward once I executed the cases and traced the failures.

Now convert that round robin logic to consistent hashing.

After the debugging part, they asked me to convert that piece from round robin to consistent hashing. There were no hard constraints, so I was free to structure it however I wanted, and I wrote more of a pseudocode-style implementation while explaining the approach.

I designed the backend for a donation app that would be live for about three days. I started with the functional and non-functional requirements, then walked through the request path and how the payment flow would work. In the deep dive, they focused on how I would prevent double payments and how I would handle peak traffic during that short burst. So the important part was showing payment correctness and scalability.

How did your team handle it when a senior teammate left?

I talked through how our team handled losing a senior teammate, what I did to keep things moving, what feedback I had received, and how I think about giving feedback upward. He seemed to care about how I operate when the team dynamic changes, not just whether I can tell a polished story.

Tell me about this project on your resume and what you specifically did.

He picked one project from my resume that he was very interested in, and I went into the domain, what the project was about, and what I specifically worked on. He was trying to get past the headline and see whether I had real depth there.

How do you use AI in your day-to-day work?

I answered again how I use AI in my day-to-day workflow. Since it came up here and in the recruiter round, it felt like they wanted a practical answer, not just a buzzword answer.