I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Freshworks in Sept 2024
Interview
Interview Process & Rejection
The interview had four rounds:
First Round: Coding round. Cleared.
Second Round: Design round. Cleared.
Third Round: Bar Riser round (Coding + Design). Cleared.
Fourth Round: Hiring Manager round. Not Cleared.
The hiring manager decided I wasn't a fit for his specific role, which he wanted to be more focused on infrastructure provisioning. He felt my profile was better for product development and backend work, so he passed me to a different team.
The Final Round: A Complete Waste of Time
This new team scheduled an interview with a director. The recruiter told me this round would be about Technical Leadership, but it was just another design round.
The interviewer asked me to design a rate limiter. When I did the right thing and tried to clarify the scope and requirements, she told me to "come up with these things on my own." She then suddenly changed the problem mid-stream to designing an authentication system.
When I started designing a Single Sign-On (SS-On) system, she got confused and told me to design the service provider instead. She then changed the problem again to a document upload system. I gave her a standard, production-grade solution using S3 pre-signed URLs that we use in my current company, which she accepted.
The entire mess lasted about 45 minutes.
The Final Insult
The recruiter called to reject me, saying the director was "not satisfied with the low-level and high-level design."
This is an absolute joke. I have 10 years of experience at a reputed company, designing and implementing systems every month. I had already cleared two previous design rounds in their own process. To be rejected on those very grounds in a fourth round by a confused interviewer is a complete farce.
My Verdict on This Company
I feel my time was completely wasted after a month of preparation and dealing with their constant reschedules. This company seems to enjoy wasting candidates' time under the guise of a rigorous process.
If you have five interview rounds, each one hour long, even a good candidate is bound to face an unprepared or moody interviewer and get rejected for nonsense reasons.
My advice to anyone considering Freshworks: Be prepared for this exact kind of unprofessional and disrespectful experience. They did the same thing to me last year, rejecting me for a different arbitrary reason. This is clearly a pattern with them.
1
Other Lead Software Engineer interview reviews for Freshworks
A couple of medium level leetcode questions.
2 system design rounds, each with a higher level engineer.
The leetcode questions went for basic stack and tree DS only.
The system design rounds were for log system.
I applied and they called. We decided a date and the interview happened on that date. It went well. It was good.
I got selected. They offered me the position.
Process is very smooth , it takes 2 week to complete
HR is very polite & helpful.
Two technical Round
-DSA questions based on Trie, Heap
- System Design questions like File System Document
Managerial Round
HR round