EPAM Systems Interview Experience for Senior Software Engineer 4 YOE (July 2024)

Round 1:

Duration: 1 hour

• 20 minutes per question for the following problems (Total: 40 minutes):
• Return the longest common prefix in a string.
• Return the maximum subarray sum from an integer array.
• The remaining 20 minutes consisted of technical questions related to my familiar technology, which was Java:
• Questions on multithreading (Executor Services, Synchronization, Volatile, Transient).
• Questions related to streams.
• Design patterns I am familiar with.
• Discussion on the CI/CD pipeline of my project, as I indicated I had worked on it.

Round 2:

• Duration: 1 hour
• Focus: Understanding my development experience. Questions covered:
  • Microservices, Kafka, Caching, Distributed Transactions, DNS, REST APIs, and Design Patterns.
  • I explained the Kafka architecture and the fallback methods we used when the consumer fails.
  • Discussed microservice patterns I am familiar with and their implementation in my previous projects.
  • Asked to write a POST API for a specific scenario and discussed HTTP error codes and methods.
  • Discussed exception handling in Spring Boot.
  • Questions on design patterns, including the Strategy pattern and Singleton.
  • Questions on API gateways, load balancers, and the Circuit Breaker pattern.
  • Discussed distributed transactions and the SAGA pattern.
  • Questions on caching, Redis, and relevant use cases I have worked on.
  • My understanding of DNS.

Round 3:

• Duration: 45 minutes
• Content:
  1. Discussion of Java 8 features and their explanations.
  2. Solving the Anagram grouping problem using streams.
  3. Understanding HashMaps, Concurrent HashMaps, and their internal workings.
  4. Indexing and normalization in databases.
  5. Discussion about the projects I have worked on and the expectations from me.

Result: Selected | Offer Denied