I interviewed at Google, Uber, Walmart, Amazon and several top startups (a total of 60+ interviews) during my job search from March to June 2025 before joining Atlassian as a Principal Engineer. Here’s what each experience taught me. If you’re prepping for a switch, I hope this

Last year, I cracked Atlassian’s loop, moved into a Principal Engineer role, and had offers from Amazon, Salesforce, Deliveroo, Walmart and Confluent on the table. On LinkedIn it looks like a clean success story. In reality, those three months nearly broke me. The internet

Lore accurate...xD

What you think a referral is: VIP pass to an offer letter. The reality: It is a warm introduction into a hard process. A referral pulls you out of a black hole in the ATS and puts you in front of a human. It does not cancel the phone screen. It does not cancel the coding

I’m a Principal Engineer, but I still don’t like to call myself an expert in Backend systems. Every year, the more I learn, the more I find how much of an ocean this field is. However, after 12 years and surviving lots of production breaks, if I were restarting in 2026, these

As a Principal Software Engineer who's given 200+ interviews in the last 12 years at Microsoft, Atlassian, Google, Uber, Freshworks, and 10s of other companies, here's a system design pattern cheatsheet I wish I had created earlier. You see, one of the habits I had that helped

7 general tips that helped me get 300% better results at coding interviews and flipped my results from rejections to success (Salesforce, Atlassian, Deliveroo, Uber). If you have a Leetcode-style round coming up, pay attention. [1] Start with constraints before you touch the

3 months ago, Meta launched their new AI-enabled coding round and made it part of the standard loop. In the last 10 weeks, I have helped 2 Senior Engineers clear Meta’s loops, and if you are preparing for it, these are the three big things I want you to remember: [1] Use AI

"Later" is a dangerous word, it turned my 2013 Microsoft rejection into four years of stagnation at TCS. By 2018, I was four years deep into TCS, getting paid 50% less than my IIT colleagues for the same exact work. I had two choices: keep complaining about "bias" or build a

I’ve interviewed 30+ Sr. SDEs going for L5/L6 level roles at Meta, Google & Amazon. A lot of them failed the database question in the SD round. The mistake? They name the technology before they understand the workload. If you want the 1Cr+ total compensation, you have to stop

I gave 60+ interviews last year, and I can tell you for a fact that mediocre preparation will not help you clear these rounds. System design rounds have a heavy weightage and for good reason. They test you for: – How you frame an ambiguous problem and choose the constraints –

My 2025 on LinkedIn went like this: -Joined Atlassian as a Principal Software Engineer -Scaled my LinkedIn Community to over 40,000 folks -Gave over 60+ interviews this year & cleared 6 companies -Took 30+ mock interviews, and 5 mentees got placed -at Meta (x2), Walmart,

I was asked this system design problem in 3 out of 11 Big Tech companies I interviewed at this year, including Amazon, Google, Atlassian, Salesforce, Walmart, and others. For context, I landed 6 offers this year during my 3-month job switch journey: 1. Amazon (Senior Eng. L6)

90 LPA–1.4 Cr/year job requirements for an L5 Senior Engineer Role or Equivalent at FAANG+ companies: ↣ hardcore DSA ↣ strong system design ↣ full-stack development ↣ AWS or GCP proficiency ↣ experience writing design docs ↣ ability to design scalable services ↣ AI/ML

One thing I did in every system design question that helped a lot: Before drawing any boxes, I tried to label the pattern. – Is this primarily a read-heavy system with some background writes and caching – Is it a write-heavy / event-driven system where most work happens async –

Say you’re giving a system design round and you get asked: “Design a global rate limiter behind a CDN.” When you answer, you will choose to cache, that’s given, but a sharper question is: where do you cache, client, edge, service, or DB layer? There is no single right answer.

Give me 2 minutes and I’ll tell you my exact system design preparation strategy that helped me get Senior and Staff level roles from Deliveroo, Walmart, Atlassian, Salesforce & Confluent. Please note that most of this prep was done in 3.5 months while working full-time, you

This is exactly what appeasement culture in the Indian corporate world does to people.

You might be given the question “Design Instagram” at Amazon for an SDE II interview. Or “Design a Rate Limiter” at Uber for an SDE II+ interview. In both cases, you will use caching. A good question is: how will you write to that cache and database? There are many moving parts

I'm a Principal Software Engineer @ Atlassian with over 12 years of experience. If I were back in my interview days and wanted to build my system design fundamentals, here are 90+ fundamental questions I would grill myself on until I completely grasped the concepts.. ➤ Core