Coursera has recently started their new office in Pune, India and I was approached to interview for a senior frontend engineer role by a recruiter on LinkedIn.
In total, I went through 5 rounds of interviews.
5 rounds of interviews at Coursera for Senior Frontend Engineer role.
Round 1 – Machine coding
The first round was a machine coding round or as I call it filter round where you will be evaluated on your expertise with JavaScript and DOM manipulation. Based on the verdict of this round, you will proceed to take the next rounds of interviews.
The question was regarding creating a queueable progress bar by dynamically creating the bars at runtime through JavaScript code using setTimeout and setInterval and dynamic durations.
Round 2 – System Design
The second round was the System Design round and to my surprise, this was a complete backend system design where I was asked to design an artifact library that can store the components as micro-frontend and can be imported or pruned.
Was asked to design the tables, their relations, and the request and response API contracts.
Round 3 – JavaScript Problem Solving
I was asked to create the publisher-subscriber design pattern (observable design pattern) with three different variations. You can learn more about this problem from this YouTube video where I have solved it.
Round 4 – Code review
I was given a set of instructions that I had to evaluate in a sample PR and look for the open points from the perspective of a senior engineer addressing a junior developer’s PR.
Had to look at the frontend as well as the backend code (Data models) and address all the issues.
Round 5 – Data Structure & Algorithms
In this round, they asked me to solve an algorithmic question based on the string data structure.
The question was regarding having only N length of characters of words in a given line and moving the remaining words to the next line. If certain words cannot fit distribute the remaining spaces.
Conclusion
The recruiter called me and briefed me about where I failed in the System Design and DSA rounds. Overall it was a good experience interviewing with Coursera.
