Synthesized from 26 candidate submissions for ALL.
Dream11’s hiring process for technical roles is rigorous and multi-staged, emphasizing strong problem-solving skills, depth in system design, and alignment with the company’s culture (DO-PUT). Candidates often undergo 5-6 rounds, including DSA, database internals, system design, managerial, and HR rounds. Offers are extended to candidates demonstrating technical depth, scalability mindset, and cultural fit, while rejections are often attributed to gaps in problem-solving, system design, or behavioral alignment.
The candidate underwent a thorough five-round interview process for the SDE-2 position at Dream11, including DSA, database, system design, managerial, and HR rounds. The process was well-organized, with the first two rounds conducted virtually and the remaining three in Dream11's Mumbai office. The candidate received an offer, highlighting a positive outcome.
This round focused on Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA), where the candidate was asked to solve 2 problems within 1 hour. The problems involved using maps with string keys and lists, and manipulating a numeric string to remove specific digits to achieve the smallest possible number. The interviewer provided hints and support.
Solve a problem involving maps with string keys and lists, requiring binary search implementation.
Given a numeric string and a number k, remove k digits from the string to make the resulting number the smallest possible.
This round focused on database concepts and a deep dive into the candidate's resume. The interviewer explored past experiences, design choices, tech stack used in previous projects, and asked detailed questions about PostgreSQL (concurrency control, isolation levels, locks, replication, scaling reads and writes), reactive stack (Netty and R2DBC), and system design (e.g., implementing a ticket booking system like BookMyShow).
Describe a project you are currently working on and the design choices made.
Explain PostgreSQL concurrency control, isolation levels, locks, and replication.
How would you scale PostgreSQL reads and writes?
Explain how Netty and R2DBC work in a reactive stack.
How would you implement a ticket booking system like BookMyShow at scale?
How would you ensure that when a person selects a seat, others cannot see it?
This round assessed the candidate's system design skills. The interviewer asked to design an alerting and monitoring system like Prometheus and Grafana. The discussion included defining scope, non-functional and functional requirements, estimating scale, database storage layer, consistency vs. availability trade-offs, timeseries data storage format, and how Prometheus server detects new pods for scraping metrics. The interviewer also asked about maintaining active web connections with many clients.
Design an alerting and monitoring system like Prometheus and Grafana, define scope, NFRs, FRs, and estimate scale for the system, how will timeseries data be stored and in what format, how will Prometheus server know to start scraping metrics from a new pod, and how will you maintain active web connections with many clients to scrape metrics?
This round was taken by a Vice President of Dream11 with over 8 years of experience. The interviewer focused on the candidate's past work experience and posed scenario-based questions to understand their mindset and problem-solving approach. The discussion was non-technical and revolved around handling challenging situations.
How would you prepare your system for IPL given that it is coming?
Explain the SDLC process you follow to develop a feature.
What is the most challenging problem you have solved in Navi? What was your contribution?
How do you keep yourself updated with new technologies?
What is the procedure you follow to solve any incident/bug in your company?
Questions based on the candidate's resume.
This round was conducted by an experienced HR with over 13 years of experience. The discussion focused on the candidate's personal background, schooling, college experiences, interest in coding, reasons for leaving their current company, and future perspectives.
Discuss childhood, schooling, college experiences, and interest in coding.
Reasons for wanting to leave the current company.
Candidate's future perspectives and goals.
The interview process was considered to be of average difficulty and covered a mix of data structures, algorithms, and system design concepts.
The technical interview focused on algorithmic problem solving and architectural concepts.
Graph based problems
Greedy algorithm problems
Dynamic programming problems
Database schema design
Project architecture and ideation
InterviewDigest