Mock interview

I've been through full Senior/Staff loops at large tech companies and AI-native startups in the past year, and I work daily on distributed systems at 250M+ user scale. So the round I run is close to the real thing — including the follow-up questions that separate a Senior answer from a Staff one.

Pick the round you want:

System design — a realistic prompt in distributed systems or data infrastructure. I'll push on scale, failure modes, trade-offs, and the parts most candidates skip: requirements gathering, back-of-envelope numbers, and defending a decision under pressure.

Behavioral — real questions from actual loops, evaluated against the signals interviewers score on. We'll work on STAR/CARL structure, story selection, and whether your stories are doing the job you think they are.

Deep dive / past project — the round people prep for least and fail most. I'll interrogate a project on your resume the way a Staff interviewer would.

How it runs: brief intro, then the round with no hand-holding, then feedback in the remaining time — what landed, what didn't, what level your answer read at, and the two or three specific things to change before your next one. You'll get written notes after.

Come with: your target company and level, which round you want, and any specific feedback you've had before. If you have a real interview coming up, tell me the date.

Coding — a LeetCode-style problem run under real interview conditions: think out loud, handle the follow-up, write code that compiles. I work in Java and I'll push on the things graders actually score — clarifying the problem before you start, complexity reasoning, edge cases, and clean implementation under time pressure. Strong on arrays, strings, sliding window, graphs, DP, and concurrency problems.

One thing to expect: I'll grade honestly. If the answer wouldn't have passed, I'll say so and tell you why. That's the point of doing this before the real one.