Alibaba Group Software Engineer interview experience

Got offer

Medium

Positive

Beijing, BeijingPosted May 2020 · Candidate report, summarized by Dataford

My first technical conversation was a phone interview that focused heavily on a specific protocol: Raft.

It wasn’t just a quick overview—I ended up explaining details and walking through how the ideas connect.

For the second round, I spoke with two interviewers and the technical part included a DFS problem. After that, the final round moved into system design, and they asked me to go deep into the details of distributed consensus, including how the components work together.

The whole process felt like it kept escalating in scope: protocol knowledge first, then graph/algorithm reasoning, and finally system-level thinking about distributed coordination. I ended up receiving an offer, and the

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