Coinbase IC5

Previous company: Amazon (SDE2)
Years of exp: 5+ years

Reason for change: Bad team, very bad culture. Manager was a very evil person.

The interview process is divided into 5 rounds (2 screening, 3 onsite and 1 manager):

1.) Aptitude test (40 min):
This is an online test and there were 40 questions to be solved in 20 minutes. You are expected to have 20+ correct answers. The questions are basic aptitude questions but speed matters a lot.
Indiabix is a great online source to practice.

I was able to complete 32 questions and I believe most of them were correct.

Verdict: Passed screening

2.) Code signal round (70 or 90 mins):
There are 4 questions which are expected to be solved in 70 or 90 minutes (I don't remember correctly if it was 70 or 90). You are expected to correctly submit 3/4 solutions.

I was able to submit all the question solutions correctly.

Verdict: Passed screening

3.) System Design Interview (60 mins):
Crypto dashboard: Consider you are receiving updates for different tokens (i.e. cryptocurrencies) every 2 seconds from different exchanges, design a system to display average of these tokens which is updated every 10 seconds.

I designed a scalable system which was performant enough and the interviewer seemed ok with it.

Verdict: Hire

4.) Domain Interview - Coding round (60 mins):
GIven a bunch of transactions with fields like id, userid, currency, amount , time etc implement filters on it. In the second part I was expected to implement pagination with the best techniques and explain different strategies like curson pagination, limit/offset etc.
There was a third part as well with more complex use cases which I implemented as well.
(Sorry, I am unable to recall the 3rd part modifications correctly)

People might get confused here as initially they might see this as a very simple problem and might fail to identify the catch in the first part. The reason is that there actually is no catch. Implement it as soon as possible using brute force unless asked to use a performant solution. The second/third part might be more complex and will need more time to think/implement so save it for that.

I was able to complete everything in time.

Verdict: Hire

5.) Tech Execution Interview - Coding round (60 mins):
Part 1 : Similar to https://leetcode.com/problems/zigzag-iterator/description/
Part 2 - GIven a list of lists, implement iterator such that next/hasNext alternates across lists.
Eg: [[1,2,3], [5,6], [7,8]] = 1,5,7,2,6,8,3
Part 3: GIven a list of iteratos, for iterators created in the previous (2nd) part, implement next/hasNext for this iterator.

Ensure to follow SOLID and OOPs principles in these coding rounds as that will allow you to write code that can evolve easily. You will also be judged on following these principles. Speed really matters in these rounds. I was able to complete everything on time.

Verdict: Hire

6.) Manager round (60 mins):
Nothing special, basic manager round with some STAR format behavioural questions.

FInal Verdit: Hire

Compensation details: https://leetcode.com/discuss/compensation/5117570/Coinbase-IC5-or-Offer

My Decision: DId not join as I had received offer from Meta which is my dream company. Will post for that soon.

Other Tier 1 companies I cleared: Meta , Google