System design interview- what to expect for compiler engineers?
Full disclosure- I haven’t interviewed anywhere since grad school. And even then I basically joined the place I interned at. Till now I had mostly said ‘not interested’ to interview requests. But I’ve recently started setting up a few interviews . Till now I’ve done phone screens with Apple, Facebook and Nvidia and they have been mostly talking about previous experience, some coding, some compiler theory questions, some computer architecture questions- all of which makes sense.
I now have an on-site interview scheduled with 2 of them - and possibly another with the 3rd. On doing some reading up online, I see system design interview mentioned a lot. FB was the only one which brought up system design interview as a possibility for the virtual on-site.
So my question is -
1. is system design interview a thing at most places?
2. Is it a thing irrespective of the position? To elaborate- I’m interviewing for compiler positions…so is it fair to not expect say FB to ask me design their ‘user feed’ etc? I would understand if they ask me how I would go about implementing a language feature for a compiler but designing a service etc does not make any sense to me. Am I being too naive?
Appreciate any input from others who have been in similar position.
YOE - 5
comments
Best to have discussion with recruiter about it. For FB, you need to study hard now.
BTW, can in interest you in devices org at Amazon? 😊
There are problems to solve for cross target compilation, ABIs, AoT and JIT. DM if interested.
In case you’re interested. 🙂