Oracle USA Principal Member of Technical Staff (PMTS) Interview Process

Role: Principal MTS (PMTS)

Phone Screen (60 mins) *

Behavioral: Two questions. *

Coding: Standard Binary Tree problem (completed in 5 minutes). *

System Design: Metrics and Logging

Role: Principal MTS (PMTS)

Phone Screen (60 mins) *

Behavioral: Two questions. *

Coding: Standard Binary Tree problem (completed in 5 minutes). *

System Design: Metrics and Logging system. The 35-minute discussion focused on Kafka, ElasticSearch, and evaluating design choices and tradeoffs.

Onsite Rounds *

System Design: *

Problem: Design a job scheduler system. *

Discussion: The session covered indexes, DynamoDB Primary and Sort keys, Global Secondary Indexes (GSI), and the justification for using NoSQL. Included two behavioral questions. *

Hiring Manager: *

Structure: 30 minutes of behavioral questions followed by 30 minutes of system design. *

System Design: The problem related to the team's specific domain. The interviewer focused on questioning design choices, proposing alternatives, comparing tradeoffs, and discussing design flexibility regarding future requirements. *

Coding: *

Problem: Given a large prompt regarding flight data with dependencies (flight1 -> flight2) and a list of currently delayed flight IDs,

return a sorted list of all delayed flights. *

Solution: Applied DFS (Depth First Search) to solve the dependency chain. Included two behavioral questions. *

Bar Raiser: *

Focus: A 60-minute deep dive into professional background, most challenging projects, design choices, personal impact, cross-team collaboration, conflict resolution, handling failure, and mentoring junior to mid-senior engineers. *

Coding: *

Problem: Find the maximum length of a sequence containing all unique IDs within a given list. *

Follow-up: Find the maximum length if the sequence allows at most 'k' distinct unique IDs. *

Context: These were standard sliding window problems found on LeetCode. Included two behavioral questions.

Outcome Received positive feedback and an offer within two days, but declined in favor of competing Staff-level offers.