interview is friday at 2pm. four rounds, each 45 min.
round 1 — system design. they'll ask about a high-throughput service. lean on the ad-serving work from last year. talk about: read replicas, consistent hashing, the cache invalidation incident and what we learned.
round 2 — coding. medium-hard leetcode. warm up tuesday/wednesday on graph problems. don't over-optimize prematurely.
round 3 — leadership. story bank: the migration that almost shipped late, the report who turned around, the time I disagreed with my skip and how it played out. STAR format, two minutes each.
round 4 — fit / questions for them. ask about: how the team measures success, what's the hardest problem on their roadmap, how decisions get made when senior people disagree.
rest plan — sleep early thursday, no caffeine after noon friday, eat lunch at noon. wear the navy sweater.