C3.ai Software Engineer interview experience

The early technical parts were what I expected—DSA-style problems that felt fairly standard to work through—but the system design session was where things soured.

In that design round, the interviewer didn’t really engage as if we were exploring options. I tried to lay out alternative architectural approaches and discuss tradeoffs, but it felt like there was already a single “acceptable” direction and my alternatives were brushed aside. It stopped being a back-and-forth discussion and started feeling like I was being tested on whether I could infer the interviewer’s exact preference.

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