Alibaba Group Software Engineer interview experience

I was asked about project-related work and then hit with algorithmic questions, including a dynamic-programming backpack problem. After that, the conversation pulled me into deeper software fundamentals—things like JVM and collection internals, plus database-related concepts such as indexing in MySQL.

At some point, the interview shifted into a system-level design challenge where I had to lay out how to handle extremely high throughput, on the order of a 100,0000 QPS scale. It wasn’t just about naming components; I had to reason through performance and architectural choices under heavy load.