Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure Interview Experience at Freshworks – 2025

A 90-minute opening round conducted over video call. The interviewer typically first asks candidates to walk through their current role, the specific tools and tech stack used day to day, and how responsibilities have evolved over the past year. The single coding question is a linked list intersection problem - given two singly linked lists, find the node at which they merge - best solved using a two-pointer technique that equalizes list lengths first. The system design question asks candidates to design a ride-hailing app like Uber at a high level; a solid answer focuses on the core entities (riders, drivers, trips, pricing), the matching problem between nearby available drivers and requesting riders, and a rough data flow for real-time location updates.

This round leans heavily into operating system fundamentals. Candidates are asked to explain the difference between a process and a thread in terms of memory sharing, and then walk through several CPU scheduling algorithms - round robin, shortest job first, and priority scheduling - including the tradeoffs of each for a system handling many short-lived requests versus a few long-running batch jobs. The conversation then moves into Docker and Kubernetes: the practical difference between a Docker image layer cache and why ordering Dockerfile instructions correctly matters for build speed, followed by Kubernetes questions on how a Deployment's rolling update strategy actually works under the hood, specifically the maxSurge and maxUnavailable parameters and what each controls during a rollout.

Building on the earlier Uber-style prompt, this round goes deeper into the actual system design. Candidates are specifically asked about the database schema for storing trip and pricing data, why sharding the trips table by geographic region might be preferred over a simple hash of trip ID, and how to handle a hot-spotting problem if one city generates disproportionately more trips than others. The round also covers caching strategy for frequently accessed driver location data and the tradeoff between cache freshness and the load placed on the primary datastore.

A standard closing HR round covering current compensation, expected compensation band, notice period at the candidate's current company, and confirming availability to start within Freshworks' typical onboarding window.