SDE 3 at F5 Networks

How it went

What they would tell you

How to prepare

Their background

Round by round

1. 1

   Coding Round60 min

   Problem: Rearrange Array in Zig-Zag Fashion Given an unsorted array, reorder it so that elements follow the pattern arr[0] < arr[1] > arr[2] < arr[3] … while maintaining relative order where possible, i explained brute-force approach first, then optimized to O(n) using a single pass swap strategy Interviewer asked follow-ups on Linux commands, OS fundamentals, and networking basics

   • Rearrange Array in Zig-Zag Fashion
2. 2

   Systems Design Round60 min

   One of the most interesting problems I got during my Go interview was building a Concurrent File Processor I had to design a system where multiple goroutines safely process files from a shared folder, handling synchronization, task distribution, and error management Talked a lot about goroutines and channels, and how to manage resource pools, Then the interviewer went down the rabbit hole of Redis caching, Kafka event ordering, and database performance tuning. It was one of those rounds that felt more like a deep tech discussion than a test.

3. 3

   Managerial Round60 min

   Round 3 was honestly one of the toughest. It started casually with questions around leadership and ownership, and then quickly escalated into technical dive I had to design a rate limiter in Go using channels, talk about interface design, and handle goroutine safety. From there, it spiraled into distributed systems, where we discussed how to maintain throughput and fault tolerance at scale. The conversation also covered database optimization, Redis consistency, Kafka partitioning, Elasticsearch shard design, and even network load balancing, basically everything that keeps a large-scale backend alive and fast.

4. 4

   HR Round60 min

   A closing round centered around compensation expectations, culture, benefits, and career path.

What came up