eBay Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

So this was for SWE-III at TCGPlayer. The final interview was super misaligned with what they told me earlier. The whole loop had three parts: first, a recruiter screen, then the hiring manager screen, and finally the technical screen. The recruiter mentioned they were modernizing the team and needed someone who knew system migrations, Kafka, SQS, SNS, and event-driven pub-sub. They asked about my experience with streams, topics, and message processing. The hiring manager call was all behavioral. He basically repeated what the recruiter said and mentioned the next round would be about C# and debugging. I was expecting a C# debugging technical interview after that. I scheduled the final interview with the recruiter, and they confirmed it would be in C#, but said I could switch if needed. Since I don't do C#, I spent a week practicing C# drills and debugging exercises. The recruiter also said the final round would be coding plus system design or architecture, and it would be 60 or 90 minutes, but they never clarified which, even when I asked. But the actual technical interview was nothing like that. They didn't ask anything in C#, didn't have me debug, and didn't talk about system design or architecture. Instead, it was one simple coding problem and then a bunch of old textbook questions, like what's a Singleton and what's Dependency Injection. It felt like a new grad interview from years ago. I had prepared to discuss dead letter queues, Kafka partitioning, and distributed systems, so these trivia questions felt totally off, and I felt unprepared because it wasn't relevant. They didn't ask about my resume or background at all. Nothing about migrations, Kafka, SQS, SNS, or distributed systems came up. The whole thing felt inconsistent and like a waste of prep time. The hiring manager had said SWE3 is like a senior role elsewhere, but the interview didn't feel senior at all.

I had an interview drive on November 7th with three rounds. I passed the first two technical rounds. The third round was a managerial interview where I was asked about my previous projects. After explaining them, the manager asked if I was good at Java, which seemed like a strange question given I had already passed the technical rounds. No other questions were asked. I suspect this drive might have been for marketing purposes, especially since they opened a new GCC. Despite clearing two rounds and having no incorrect answers in the manager round, I was rejected. My suggestion is that if you don't seriously intend to select candidates, don't waste their time, as people dedicate their whole day to these interviews.

We had to design Node.js modules for file stuff like adding files, updating their size, adding users, getting files, and removing files. Then, we had to write solid Mocha tests for it, covering all the good cases, tricky situations, how it handles errors, and making sure it works right even if things happen at the same time, using fake file systems for the tests. The tests needed to check if addFile actually creates stuff, if updateSize changes the bytes correctly, if addUser registers people, if getFile pulls the right info, and if removeFile gets rid of files. Also had to make sure it handles when things don't exist, checks permissions, deals with timing issues, and validates all inputs for every function.