Ethos Life Interview Questions
& Process

So basically I got this OA link first. After that, I got shortlisted for the actual interviews. The interviews themselves were pretty chill, just one DSA round and one LLD round. The OA was the hard part, though. It was 90 minutes long and had 3 questions: 2 DSA questions that were graph and tree based, and 1 backend problem. The interviewer really cared more about how I thought about the problem than the final answer. The LLD round was with a Senior Manager, and he was super helpful.

Started with good rounds with the hiring manager and stakeholders, they were insightful and open-minded. Then came the design challenge, which was given at the start of the interview. I had a 25-minute discussion with a principal designer on the panel, with about half an hour for the challenge itself. I approached it from a design, business, and product market fit perspective, but the panel seemed stuck on UI and kept interrupting. It was strange to see that kind of behavior from someone senior. I tried simplifying my explanation using basic business terms, but they didn't get it and it wasn't received well.

It started with a call from the recruiter, then I spoke with the hiring manager. After that, there was a take-home exercise that took way longer than the 2-4 hours they said it would. Finally, there was supposed to be a presentation to the hiring manager and some other team members, but I didn't get to present at all. Instead, they just asked me really specific questions that weren't really related to the strategic thinking part of the exercise. The good thing was the recruiter gave feedback pretty fast after each step.

So, there were 4 rounds in total. The first two were coding rounds, one with easy to medium LeetCode problems, and the second with medium to hard ones. Then came the architecture design round for a company review platform, which went pretty well, covering db design, APIs, scaling, and async processing. The final round was with the VP, focusing on my past experience, particularly a project I liked, and we dug into its architecture. Everything seemed to go great, and I got positive feedback from HR. HR then asked for documents like my offer letter, appraisal, and payslips. They took about 4-5 days to get back, and then the HR called to say no offer. No specific feedback, just that my expertise didn't align with the role. Honestly, it's frustrating to go through all these rounds with positive feedback just to be told that.