Recruitment Stories - Navid's Experience at Exabyting

Md Navid Razzaque is currently working at Exabyting as a Software Engineer. He graduated from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Khulna University of Engineering & Technology in 2023. After completing his degree, he began his professional journey as an Associate Software Engineer through the Star Coder program at Brain Station 23, one of Bangladesh’s leading software development companies, where he worked for approximately one and a half years. He later joined TechnoNext Software Limited, a concern of the US-Bangla Group, as a Software Engineer II and worked there for around nine months. Most recently, he transitioned to Exabyting as a Software Engineer (L3).

Since beginning his professional career, Navid has been deeply involved in building and maintaining scalable backend systems. Beyond feature development, he has consistently focused on system design clarity and maintainability. He enjoys breaking down complex backend challenges, optimizing service interactions, and continuously refining his understanding of scalable system design.

He applied for the role through LinkedIn. The hiring process consisted of four rounds, all conducted online except for the final one.

Hiking Round — Fundamentals, Distributed Systems, and Core Java (Round 1)

The first round primarily focused on evaluating his backend fundamentals, distributed systems knowledge, and practical understanding of real-world system design challenges. He was initially asked about his current technology stack and undergraduate thesis, which naturally led to deeper discussions around distributed systems and their common pitfalls.

A significant portion of the discussion revolved around event-driven architecture concepts, including Kafka producer-consumer challenges, mitigation strategies, the Outbox pattern, retry mechanisms, consumer lag handling, fallbacks, and traceability using trace IDs.

The interviewers also assessed his understanding of the Spring ecosystem through discussions on the differences between Spring and Spring Boot, as well as the lifecycle and behavior of beans and components during application startup.

Database concepts formed another major focus area, including PostgreSQL and Redis, SQL and ACID properties, indexing techniques and their trade-offs, and the role of NoSQL databases in scalable system design.

Core Java fundamentals were tested thoroughly through questions on static behavior, HashMap internals such as hashing algorithms, collision handling, resizing, and red-black tree optimization, along with sorting algorithms like Merge Sort and Quick Sort and their trade-offs. He was also asked conceptual questions about binary search trees and the performance implications of skewed trees.

The round concluded with an opportunity for him to ask questions. To prepare for this stage, he reviewed his CV extensively and refreshed his knowledge of DSA, Core Java, Spring Boot, System Design, Event-Driven Architecture, and Microservices. This round lasted approximately 45 minutes.

Trekking Round — Architecture Thinking, Concurrency, and Real-World Experience (Round 2)

A few days later, he appeared for the second round, which focused more heavily on architectural thinking, concurrency concepts, and real-world project experience.

The session began with an introduction where he discussed his career goals and aspirations of growing toward a Solution Architect role. The interviewers then moved into database and concurrency topics, including optimistic and pessimistic locking, as well as Java synchronization mechanisms such as synchronized, volatile, and ReentrantLock.

A detailed discussion followed around the Isolation property of ACID, default isolation levels, common anomalies, and techniques databases use to prevent isolation-related issues.

A major portion of the conversation centered on his previous project experience, including the systems he worked on, his responsibilities, and how he implemented real-time updates using WebSockets. He explained how RabbitMQ was used to horizontally scale the WebSocket server and how large-scale data storage and retrieval were optimized through effective indexing strategies, including index key selection and associated trade-offs.

The interviewers also evaluated his understanding of software design principles within Spring Boot, including tight versus loose coupling, the internal workings of Dependency Injection, and the practical application of the Dependency Inversion principle from SOLID. A scenario-based discussion further expanded into Interface Segregation and broader object-oriented programming principles.

This round lasted nearly two hours. Navid prepared for it similarly to Round 1, but with greater emphasis on project experience, architectural decisions, and design trade-offs.

Rafting Round — Vision, Culture, and Mutual Alignment (Round 3)

The Rafting Round was a two-way conversational session with the CEO and focused more on alignment than technical evaluation. The discussion revolved around his long-term vision, career aspirations, and how he envisioned his growth within the organization.

He also had the opportunity to ask questions regarding the company’s culture, expectations, and future direction. The CEO shared detailed insights into the company’s vision, values, and growth plans, along with expectations from engineers in terms of ownership, mindset, and impact.

This round lasted approximately two hours and was primarily intended to ensure strong alignment between the company’s expectations and his personal career goals.

Summit Round — Offer Discussion and Welcome Session (Round 4)

The final stage, referred to as the Summit Round, took place at the office premises with the HR team. This session focused on discussing the offer details, compensation structure, and employee benefits in a transparent manner.

It also served as a welcoming interaction where the team officially introduced him to the Exabyting family and ensured he had a complete understanding of the onboarding process and next steps before joining the company.

Special thanks to Md Navid Razzaque for taking out the time to share his recruitment experience with me. If you have any queries, feel free to contact him at navidrazzaque@gmail.com