applying to their new grad SWE role and I'm kind of spiraling a bit. I've done the standard leetcode prep but I don't have a ton of distributed systems experience since I only graduated in May. the JD mentions CDN and networking knowledge and I don't know how much of that is "nice to have" vs "we will quiz you hard on this."
has anyone gone through their new grad loop recently? is the systems design round the same as for senior candidates or is it calibrated differently? I understand anycast at a high level and I've read about BGP but I'm not sure how deep they drill on new grads.
3 replies
careerveteran
for new grads the systems design round is definitely calibrated. they're not expecting you to have deployed a CDN. what they want to see is that you can reason about tradeoffs, ask clarifying questions, and think through failure modes logically. read the cloudflare blog before you interview. it's genuinely good and you'll be able to reference real problems they've solved.
jp_newgrad
the blog is a great tip, thank you. some of those deep dives are really thorough. will spend time there this week.
infra_ines
agreed with above. the cloudflare blog has posts that are almost interview-prep-as-content. reading 5-6 of their deep engineering posts will teach you more about how they think than any leetcode session.