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Got the offer

SWE 3 at Ebay

Difficulty
Process took
3-4 Weeks
Rounds
5
Format
Remote
Applied via
Job Portal

How it went

SWE-3 rounds expect clarity more than fancy solutions. Your code should:

  • Be readable
  • Use meaningful names
  • Handle corner cases
  • Not depend on IDE autocomplete This leaves a very strong impression

What they would tell you

SWE-3 rounds expect clarity more than fancy solutions. Your code should:

  • Be readable
  • Use meaningful names
  • Handle corner cases
  • Not depend on IDE autocomplete This leaves a very strong impression

How to prepare

Focus on DSA patterns, not random problems

Their background

Offered Position: SWE 3 at eBay Platform: CodeSignal

Round by round

  1. 1

    Technical Round 160 min

    Coding Question: Find the element appearing more than n/3 times in an array (Majority Element-II level) Past projects deep dive Drew service architecture diagrams and walked through trade-offs

  2. 2

    Technical Round 260 min

    Find peak element in a mountain array Maximum path sum in a grid with obstacles Extra question (since time was left): Check if two BSTs are identical using recursion

  3. 3

    Technical Round 360 min

    Implemented a URL access-rate limiter (requests per user per minute) Follow-ups:

    • Why choose sliding-window vs token-bucket
    • Handling burst traffic
    • Corner cases & global scaling choices
  4. 4

    Technical Round 460 min

    Project-heavy discussion Behavioral scenarios (ownership, conflict resolution) Coding Question: Count Strictly Increasing Subarrays

  5. 5

    HM Round60 min

    Very conversational, based on interests Director was passionate about distributed systems → questions revolved around:

    • Why distributed systems excite you

    • What was the hardest design choice you’ve made Situational questions:

    • Handling production escalation at midnight

    • Prioritizing between tech debt and feature delivery Final discussion on long-term career goals

What came up

MediumRemote3 4 years

A candidate-reported account, lightly edited. Interview processes change by team and date.

Sources