American Express Staff Engineer interview questions

How did I get to know about the role? I had applied for a staff engineer on American Express Career Portal Amex Recruiter contacted over phone based on my submission after few weeks What is my years of experience? 17 Years What is my expertise? Architecture: Distributed, Microservices, REST, Event driven, API Programming: Object Oriented (Java Spring Boot (Latest Experience)), Node.js (Past Experience), Spark (Past) Messaging and Streaming: Apache Kafka Database: Relational DBMS such as Oracle, Exadata. NoSQL DB such as Mongo Packaging & Container Orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes Interview process The first round was Hiring Manager Interview(Online-30 Minutes) consisting of below conversation areas Introduction Advertised job profile explanation My experience in the past How did I handle challenge, disappointment as part of professional life Experience dealing with customers Second round was Karat driven video interview consisting of below sections( Total time 60 minutes) 1. 3 to 4 system design questions(25 Minutes) emphasizing on best practice, drawbacks on the given problem statement, estimation for budget considering a specific time duration, changes needed in order to scale.Some of the questions that I remember are as follows a)There is a video streaming app and using physical servers to have multiple copies of same video. What are the improvement areas? b)There is a online crossword puzzle app. Hint giving feature to solve crossword is being planned with two ways. First way is to get hint by hitting server and second way is to have it inbuilt as part of the app. Advantage and drawback with each of these two approach c)There is a need to process large XML file in a local computer and this process is exhausting local computer RAM. How do you resolve this issue? d) Facebook like app which is popular in US is planning to launch its debut in other countries. Necessary front end changes are incorporated. What changes are needed in the backend in order to launch in other country? e)Question like factors needed to be considered in order to plan a budget for system design. 2. Coding problem having a piece of code and problem statement. Emphasis is on the approach to solve the problem( 30 Minutes) Karat sends the feedback to the hiring company(AMEX) as soon as the assessment gets over(within 30 minutes). Candidate gets email confirmation saying feedback is sent to the hiring company I called HR of AMEX next day twice only for my call to go unanswered. Email sent to him yields a response saying "Feedback is still awaited from Karat". He did not revert when I replied to him saying Karat had already confirmed saying they have sent the feedback. I followed up after a week on the same and HR responded saying feedback is negative. HR goes incommunicado when I asked for the detailed assessment from AMEX which they would have got from Karat. Few questions still puzzles me on the hiring transparency by AMEX AMEX HR conveniently does not answer your call and does not possess professionalism to return your call AMEX HR evades the responding to your query. In my case - saying feedback is not received where as they had already received the feedback from Karat. AMEX does not share the detailed assessment feedback as part of their hiring. Goes incommunicado.

2 interviews, first with leaders in the team in same band level on the phone, and second with the hiring leader. The first interview included a coding exercise while the second was more around why this position is the right one for me. The first one also shared a lot of what the organization was looking to accomplish.