TripActions Interview Experience for Senior Backend Engineer Amsterdam 2022

As someone who recently went through a job interview process for a software engineering position, I wanted to share my experience. The process consisted of five rounds of interviews, each assessing different aspects of my skills and knowledge.

First Round: Call a recruiter, who asked me about my willingness to relocate and whether I had worked on large-scale distributed systems before. It was a brief conversation to get an idea of my general background.

Second Round: Technical interview with one of the backend engineers, who asked me a Leetcode medium-level question to assess my data structure and algorithm skills. I had to explain my thought process and come up with an optimal solution.

Third Round: Code design round, where I was asked to write production-ready code for an event management system. It felt more like a discussion, as I had to provide APIs, request and response models for each API, and explain my choices.

Fourth Round: System design round, where I was asked to design an API rate limiter. I discussed various approaches like token-based, leaky buckets, and other rate-limiting algorithms. The interviewer was interested in my ability to reason about trade-offs and choose the best solution for the specific use case.

Fifth Round: Last round was with the VP of Engineering, who assessed my values and culture fit. We had a conversation about my work philosophy and what kind of environment I thrive in.

Overall, I found the interview process to be challenging but fair. It covered a wide range of topics and skills, and it gave me a good sense of what the company was looking for in a candidate. I appreciated the opportunity to showcase my expertise and to learn from the interviewers’ feedback. If you are preparing for a similar interview process, I recommend focusing on your problem-solving skills, communication, and cultural fit.