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      Akamai

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      Senior Principal Software Engineer Interview

      26 Mar 2019
      Anonymous employee
      Santa Clara, CA
      Accepted offer
      Positive experience
      Average interview

      Application

      I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Akamai (Santa Clara, CA) in Jun 2018

      Interview

      I have worked here before, but these particular interviewers did not know me at all. This was for a quite senior engineer position, though the questions felt like they could/would be asked of anyone. Note that it was senior but not management. Overall I'd call it a tough interview that did not focus on annoying gotcha puzzles and more or less stayed on the topic of reasonably realistic design/coding/architecture matters. I appreciate this, as it won't weed out people who can't handle "brainy" questioning that's more fit for, I don't know what, but not actual engineers. There was also no "do this hard thing in 2 hours on your own" types of challenges, which I also appreciate. Somewhat annoying was the lack of time to explore each question, as 45 minutes was not enough given the pace of discussion. This, of course, depends on the interviewee, but I was having healthy discussions, not hemming and hawing.

      Interview questions [5]

      Question 1

      Architect elevator system
      1 Answer

      Question 2

      Some tricky concurrency question answering which is only possible with experience of relatively low-level details of various lock types and other details.
      Answer question

      Question 3

      Implement a queue using only stacks.
      1 Answer

      Question 4

      Describe how to implement, basically, Java's LinkedHashMap.
      1 Answer

      Question 5

      Discuss pros and cons of a past project I worked on back in 2005-2007 at the same company. Discuss design aspects of this project and how they might have been improved to make it more successful.
      1 Answer
      1