Curious if anyone who's involved in interviewing at Square knows how the much system design interview factors into hiring decision for a mid-level engineer. I felt like I did really well on the 3 coding round and the past experience round but system design was just ok. I got tripped up on a couple of questions they asked about the design and I don't think I came up with what the interviewer was looking for. YOE: 5 #square #swe
Also I was expecting to move on to talking about scaling my design but they seemed to want to focus a lot more about db schema and concurrency which is not a huge strength of mine. I asked about scaling and they mentioned they wanted to keep it simple and kept asking db questions. How would I know if I’m being judged as an L5+? The role I applied for just said software engineer and I wasn’t told anything about leveling by the recruiter
Based on YOE alone you're being considered for L4 or L5 depending on your interview performance.
Normally in the sys design interview we only move to scaling once there are no issues with the basic design.
Did you pass the interview?
Yep! Ended up getting an offer but turned it down for another opportunity
Congrats for the offers! Do you mind if I DM you?
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What were the questions? Not going to lie, it's an important interview for L5+ but there are many different ways to do well on that interview depending on your strengths.
Mainly around DB concurrency is where I struggled. He suggested after I didn’t come up with it that using features to lock rows while a transaction is in progress would have worked.