Rejected by Perplexity after the infra round wrecked me
Rejected by Perplexity after the infra round wrecked me
Been grinding interviews for about two months now, 6 YOE, mostly backend work at a mid size startup. Perplexity reached out through a recruiter and I was excited since I use the product daily.
Phone screen was Python only, no other language allowed, and I got the ToDo list for AI problem. Four parts building out task tracking, and by part 2 you have to handle parent and child dependencies cascading between BLOCKED, READY, and FAILED states. I got parts 1 and 2 done with a DFS approach but completely ran out of time before part 3, felt like the clock was working against me the whole session.
Somehow that was enough to move forward. Onsite had a system design round on something like mint.com, a coding round, and this infra round I didn't expect at all. They gave me a scenario where a service is overloaded and wanted me to name the metrics I'd pull up to debug it. I know k8s conceptually but not deeply enough to sound confident in the moment, and I could tell it wasn't going great.
Got the rejection two days later. Honestly not shocked given how shaky that infra round felt, but still stings a bit since everything else went okay. Anyone else get that round? Curious how deep they expect you to go on the debugging side.
Replies (6)
Sounds about right for Perplexity honestly, their bar for the infra stuff seems pretty inconsistent depending on who you get.
This is helpful, I have my onsite next week and had no idea there was a k8s round in the mix.
What did they ask in the coding onsite, and was this role specific the infra round sounds so hard
Congrats on getting through the todo list problem honestly, that one wrecked me on the phone screen.
Had almost the exact same experience with the infra round, felt like it came out of nowhere compared to everything else in the loop.
Yeah it's not really something you can cram for unless you've actually run k8s in prod before.
Did they say anything about which part of the loop you missed on or just a generic reject email?
Just the generic email, no specifics at all.