Workday’s interview process consisted of two technical rounds, Post introductions and few basic probing on your past projects, each round focused on system design and live coding. All coding was conducted directly on HackerRank, with screen-sharing enabled throughout to ensure the candidate isn’t relying on AI assistance or external tools. Below is a breakdown of the questions I encountered and how the experience unfolded.
Round 1: System Design
📌 Design a 4 TB in-memory cache
I was asked to design a large-scale, high-throughput in-memory caching system capable of storing 4 TB of data. The expectation was to discuss:
High-level architecture
Sharding and distribution strategy
Eviction policies
Fault tolerance and replication
Scalability considerations
Performance trade-offs
It was an open-ended problem where the interviewer probed deeper into design decisions and bottlenecks.
Round 2: Coding Challenges (Live on HackerRank)
The coding section had multiple problems, all expected to be solved while sharing the screen.
1. Range Sum Query in O(1)
Problem:
Given an array of integers, implement a method findSum(startIndex, endIndex) that returns the sum of elements between the given indices (inclusive).
The operation must run in O(1) time.
The expected approach was to precompute prefix sums and use them to answer queries instantly.
2. In-Memory Document Manager
Implement an in-memory document system with the following capabilities:
Every new document starts with version 1
Editing a document creates a new version, and only the latest version can be edited
Retrieve the list of versions for a document
For a given document and version ID, fetch the previous version
This was largely a data-structures problem involving hash maps and version-tracking logic. The interviewer reviewed the code in real time and asked clarifying questions about time and space complexity.
Post-Interview Outcome
None of the questions felt particularly difficult. I was able to solve both coding problems and produce the expected output within the allotted time. Despite that, I received a decline the next day.
To their credit, the recruitment team called personally to inform me. However, the feedback was vague—they simply said I “did not meet the interviewer’s expectations.” No further details were provided, so I’m not entirely sure where I fell short.