Headway Karat 1st Interview Round (Same for all level)

Overall, the interview was okay. Headway Karat's 1st Interview Round is the same for all levels. They just outsource the first round to Karat.

System Design - 20 mins

The system design portion, which lasted 20 minutes, included three scenario-based questions.

1. How would you estimate the infrastructure cost of an image-uploading website where each image has a TTL ranging from five minutes to 24 minutes? How would you analyze current costs and forecast infrastructure costs for the following year?

2. How would you speed up a system where a child submits a drawing and receives an animated version of it? Since the animation process is compute-intensive, the discussion focused on reducing processing time and scaling the compute infrastructure efficiently.

3. How would you handle a third-party API that keeps failing?

Coding Interview - 40 mins

I selected Java; there were other languages to select from

The coding interview was a little unusual. They pasted an existing Java codebase and asked me to understand it and complete a couple of debugging tasks. The IDE was not very interactive, and the code was poorly formatted, so it took some time just to understand what was happening.

Question 1: Find the bug

The first bug was very simple, and I found it within about five minutes.

Question 2: Add a function to existing code

The second task was more involved because it had a large amount of hard-to-read Java code, but I completed it. I started the third task and ran out of time

Overall, I completed the two coding tasks, but I didn't have time for the 3rd task. It took me a while to read the code since it was too much.