"Design a distributed rate limiter that handles 50k requests/second across regions. How would you keep counts consistent?"
"I'd start with a token-bucket per key in Redis, but to avoid a single-region bottleneck I'd shard counters and use a sliding-window approximation. For cross-region consistency I'd accept slight over-counting and reconcile asynchronously rather than pay the latency of strong consistency on every request…"
James is a senior backend engineer with 7 years of experience across Stripe and a Series-B fintech. He scored highly on both the video screening (88) and the AI interview (90), with consistent signal on technical depth and ownership. The single gap is limited GraphQL exposure. Recommended next step: advance to a human technical interview.
I want to work on payments infrastructure at scale — it's the area I've spent most of my career in and find genuinely hard and rewarding.
4 weeks
Yes — based in Berlin, EU citizen.