Adobe Software Engineer Interview Experience — Four Rounds on the AEP Team, Recruiter Wanted More System Design Experience

This was for the AEP team — a pit that a friend referred me into. Four rounds total, overall not too hard.

Round 1 was billed as tech/coding, but after we finished going over my resume, the interviewer just started asking about request latency analysis, plus some front-end/back-end fundamentals-style questions. I initially expected coding or system design, but it ended up basically being a conversation.

Round 2 was with the hiring manager, all behavioral questions. Not much to say there — just have your stories ready.

Round 3 was system design. This guy gave a quick hello and then went straight into the problem: design a system to embed files that users upload, including documents, images, and videos. Each file is capped at some x MB, and it then gets stored in a database. I felt like I did okay in this round, but the recruiter's feedback afterward was that they wanted someone with more system design experience — maybe what they really wanted was someone with an AI background.

The last round was a proper coding round — a standard, not-too-hard course schedule problem, which I solved right away. Since there was still time left, they threw in another one: word count. I didn't actually write code for it, just talked through my approach, and the follow-up was about how to handle it at large data volumes — how to do it without MapReduce, and how you'd set it up as a distributed system.

Overall the process felt fine, and the recruiter was pretty proactive too.