Naveen got an offer as an Engineering manager at Marks and Spencer

The biggest challenge in interviews was sticking to the time and knowing what the interviewers are looking for. For example, a system design is not about designing the perfect system; it is about understanding the problem, communicating your design, picking choices that solve the problem at hand (not coming up with a pre-baked solution), and being prepared to adapt and pick up cues from interviewers in the middle. The most challenging component is managing time well to give yourself the best chance of succeeding, so having a framework in place is very useful.

The coaching session with Han was very useful indeed. We had a practice session with time restrictions. He taught me a framework/structure that I could use to run the session and gave me pointers on how to stay in control of the interview! Han was very insightful and offered very useful tips. I did have 3 successful rounds of interviews at Google, but the role got filled internally (or I would have progressed). However, I had a subsequent interview with Marks and Spencer. That progressed well, and eventually I got an offer.

1. Use AI (Claude or Chat GPT etc.) to research engineering blogs, white papers etc. from the team/division you are interviewing for. This will help you learn the kind of problems they are trying to solve. Get your AI tool to generate a question bank that would be a good set of problems for you to practice. And actually do mock tests in a timed session. Be ruthless to yourself with regard to time. 2. This is a very useful tip: for each problem, think about edge cases in your design that you would have to solve (failure scenarios, scaling a part of system, multi-region, security holes, etc.) and probe your LLM on those questions. 3. Similar for coding problems: research interview questions previously asked at your target company and then make a question bank, covering common patterns involving arrays, trees, graphs, matrices, etc., and try solving and optimise for time and space. 4. Behavioural rounds. Researching the company pages to find their published values really helps. And think of how you can pull examples from your experience where you have displayed the values they are looking for. And obviously prepare for the usual behavioural questions like how you work collaboratively in a team and solve interpersonal challenges.