Why I Built This Guide (And What's Coming)

The stretch that broke me down

Earlier this year I was in the worst stretch of my career. I was laid off in January and a few months into my search I had accumulated somewhere between 20 and 30 rejections. Many of those came after completing a full onsite loop: four or five rounds, a whole day of my life, and then a form email saying they had decided to move forward with other candidates.

I have been in the industry for over ten years. I am a staff engineer. I have shipped systems that handled millions of requests per day. And I was getting rejected from jobs I was genuinely qualified for. It was demoralising in a way I was not prepared for.

The market is brutal right now. I do not think this is a hot take. Anyone in the industry knows it. We are in what I would describe as an unacknowledged recession. Companies that were hiring aggressively a few years ago are now extremely selective, and the bar for what constitutes a "safe" hire has moved. The people making hiring decisions are under more scrutiny than ever. That changes how you have to show up.

What actually changed

I want to be direct about something: I did not suddenly get smarter. I did not grind 500 more LeetCode problems. I did not discover some hidden technique that nobody else knows. What changed was that I started paying close attention to the signals I was getting (from recruiters, from interviewers, from the few pieces of honest feedback I managed to extract) and I adjusted accordingly.

The adjustments were specific. In system design, I was doing too much explaining and not enough drawing. I was clarifying requirements in a way that felt evasive rather than collaborative. In behavioral rounds, my stories were technically strong but were coming across as individual contributor stories rather than senior engineer stories. They lacked the cross-team, cross-org influence that interviewers at that level are listening for. In coding rounds, I was using the wrong language for the wrong reasons.

Once I understood what was actually being evaluated in each type of round, things started clicking. I tightened my system design approach. I rebuilt my story bank with a deliberate focus on scope and influence. I switched languages. Within three months I had four offers: a 10-person startup, a Series D startup, a Series F AI startup, and a big tech company. I am not saying any of this to brag. I am saying it because the delta between "getting rejected repeatedly" and "getting multiple offers" was not talent or effort. It was understanding what the game actually is.

Why I wrote it down

Around the same time I was going through this, I kept running into engineers in the same position. Smart people with strong backgrounds who were getting rejected and did not understand why. They were spending time on the wrong things. They were practising in ways that did not mirror real interviews. They were walking into rounds without knowing what the interviewer was actually measuring.

Most of the interview advice online is either too generic ("be confident, know your data structures"), too focused on grinding problems at the expense of everything else, or written by people who went through this process five or ten years ago when the bar and the format were genuinely different. A lot of the content out there is also produced by people who teach interview prep for a living, which introduces its own kind of distortion.

I wanted to write the guide I wish I had had when I started that search. Something specific. Something opinionated. Something written by someone who had been through the full senior interview loop recently, across multiple company types and stages, and had paid close attention to what separated the rounds that went well from the rounds that did not.

This site is that guide. It took me a while to get around to building it, but here we are.

What the guide covers

The guide is organised into sections, each covering a different part of the senior interview process. There is no filler. I have tried to write every section the way I would explain it to a friend who just started a job search and asked me to just tell them what they actually need to know.

The sections currently live on the site are:

• Resources: where to spend your prep time and what to actually get out of each resource
• Study Plan: how to structure your prep across 2, 4, or 8 weeks
• Project Work: how to talk about what you have built in a way that signals the right level
• Behavioral: the questions that always come up and how to make your answers land
• Coding: language choice, the patterns that actually come up, and how to approach each problem
• System Design: building blocks, common questions, and what interviewers at the senior level are measuring
• Components: a deep reference on each system design component and what you need to know about it
• Process: scheduling, the night before, how to debrief effectively, and a few things nobody tells you
• Resume: how to get interviews in the first place
• Bottom Line: the most important tips on one page, if you read nothing else

The guide is not a content database. You will not find practice problems here, or algorithm tutorials, or flashcards. For that content there are better places to go, and the guide tells you exactly where. The goal is to help you interview smarter, not just harder.

What's coming on this blog

The main guide is intentionally kept concise. The blog is where I will go deeper. Here is what I am planning to write:

Interview round deep dives. The guide gives you the what and the how for each round. The blog posts will go further, getting into the specific mechanics of each format, the mental models I use, the mistakes I made, and the patterns I noticed across many loops. I am planning posts on the behavioral round, the system design round, the coding round, and the past projects round.

Breaking down a real system design question. I will walk through a question I was actually asked: the approach, the missteps, the adjustments. To give you a concrete sense of what a good answer looks like end to end.

Company-specific experiences. I interviewed at a range of companies during that search: fintech, AI, and cryptocurrency. Each had its own distinct character. I will write honestly about what each experience was like, what surprised me, what I'd do differently, and what you should expect if you're interviewing at that type of company.

Interview process by company stage. The interview process at a 10-person seed startup looks almost nothing like the process at a Series D company, and both look different from a public tech company. I will break down what to expect at each stage (seed, Series A through C, Series D through F, and public) and how to calibrate your prep accordingly.

If any of that sounds useful, the best thing to do right now is bookmark the blog index or keep checking back. I will be publishing these over the coming months.

In the meantime, the main guide is live and ready. Start with the home page if you want the full picture, or jump straight to the bottom line if you want the most important takeaways fast.