5 Rounds That Tested More Than Just Coding | JioHotstar Staff SDE Interview Experience

Recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn for a Staff Software Development Engineer position at JioHotstar (JioStar), Bangalore. The interview process started a few days later and consisted of five rounds.

Role: Staff Software Development Engineer
Company: JioHotstar (JioStar)
Location: Bangalore

Round 1 - AI-Assisted Coding and LLD

Duration - (90 Minutes)

Before the interview, I was asked to set up an AI assistant and use an IDE of my choice.

Problem: Design a Workflow Management Service

Each workflow could contain a fixed number of tasks belonging to predefined task types. I started by clarifying requirements, defining entities and models, and discussing API design with the interviewer.

Once the design was approved, I used an IDE-integrated AI agent to implement the solution incrementally, reviewing and refining the generated code along the way.

The interviewer also explored design patterns and concurrency concepts. I completed the implementation with around 20 minutes remaining, which we used to discuss possible HLD extensions. Overall, this round went really well.

Round 2 - High-Level Design

Duration - (90 Minutes)

Problem: Design Hotstar's Live Viewer Counter

The objective was to design a scalable system to display the number of people watching a live stream.

I was able to address the follow-up questions, with particular focus on scalability and the trade-offs between read fanout and write fanout.

My experience building large-scale distributed systems helped me approach the problem from a practical engineering perspective.

Round 3 - Bar Raiser

This round was conducted by a Software Architect.

The first half focused on my previous projects, professional experience and how I handled conflicts and disagreements at work.

The second half involved a design problem:

Problem: Design a Clickstream Aggregator to Track Advertisement Clicks on Hotstar.

The discussion focused on designing a system to track and aggregate advertisement clicks. This round also went quite well, and we finished with some time to spare.

Round 4 - Managerial Interview

This was a general discussion covering:

• Projects and accomplishments I was proud of.

• Expectations from my next role.

• Experience with large-scale systems and end-to-end project ownership.

• Mentoring other engineers.

• How I use AI in my day-to-day engineering work.

About a week later, the recruiter confirmed that all technical rounds were complete and scheduled an HR discussion.

Round 5 - HR Discussion

The final round was fairly standard, covering my previous experience, expectations and what I was looking for in my next role.

Outcome

After the HR discussion, I waited for approximately two week before following up with the recruiter.

I was told that an update would be shared within a day, but unfortunately, I never received one. I decided not to follow up again. I didn't receive a formal rejection or detailed feedback.