1. Technical Round (Round 1) – Rate Limiter Focused on designing/implementing a rate limiter. Likely covered concepts such as: Token bucket / Leaky bucket Sliding window counters Distributed rate limiting Handling bursts, fairness, and scalability API throttling use cases 2. Onsite Round (Round 2) – Hiring Manager Discussion around: Problems you have tackled in past roles Depth of understanding in streaming and messaging systems, including: Event-driven architectures Kafka / Kinesis / Pulsar concepts Consumer groups, partitioning, backpressure At-least-once vs exactly-once delivery Real-time vs batch processing 3. Design Round – Scalability & Data Structures Worked on designing a system with: Scalability considerations (high throughput, fault tolerance, load balancing) Appropriate data structures and algorithms Possibly included: System components and communication patterns Handling large-scale data or high read/write loads Trade-offs between latency, consistency, and complexity

Trash - recruiter and hiring manager are disconnected in terms of what they are looking for. One of the engineers even told me they take a long time to give out offers. I waited 3 weeks before getting rejected but the recruiter said she'd have an answer after 1 week, meaning she kept me on the hook for an extra 2 weeks. The questions were very easy but it was a waste of time driving to and from the office. This was a good lesson. Illumio isn't public and pays pretty low too, so I'm not at a loss.