Senior

Steer and build Reddit's authentication/authorization platform serving 126M+ daily users

Interview for Reddit's Identity and Access Management team, a fully remote senior IC role responsible for the auth/authz systems behind one of the internet's most-visited sites. Expect deep technical questions on identity protocols (OAuth2/OIDC/SAML) and access models (RBAC/ABAC/ReBAC), plus behavioral probes on mentoring and driving high-leverage projects.

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What this interview tests

Authentication protocols (OAuth2, OIDC, SAML)
Authorization models (RBAC, ABAC, ReBAC) and centralized authz engines
Large-scale distributed backend system design
Go (or similar) programming proficiency
Technical mentorship and project leadership

Common question themes

Compare OAuth2, OIDC, and SAML and when you'd use each

Design a centralized authorization engine supporting RBAC/ABAC/ReBAC

Tell me about a high-leverage project you scoped and drove end to end

How have you mentored other engineers on your team

Experience with security-sensitive domains (IAM, privacy, anti-abuse)

How candidates describe it

Real Senior Backend Engineer interview stories — retold from candidates' public write-ups, with sources.

Google · Backend Software EngineerNo offer

Google Backend Engineer Interview Experience: Bangalore Onsite (Rejected)

A rejected Google Backend Engineer candidate in Bangalore recounts a recruiter screen, a gating elimination round, and a three-round onsite loop covering trees, tries, scheduling, and graph problems.

Interviewed April 2021 · Bangalore, India

Google · L3 Software EngineerOffer

Google L3 software engineer interview: phone screen, four coding rounds, and the Googleyness round

A candidate with two years of experience went from recruiter outreach to offer over about four months. The onsite was four 45-minute coding rounds — three of them featuring binary trees — and one round turned into a 25-minute chain of follow-ups about approximating an optimal solution at scale.

Interviewed June 2020 · Bangalore, IN

Google · L4 Software EngineerNo offer

Google L4 Software Engineer Interview: Eight Rounds, No Offer

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Interviewed February 2024 · Not specified

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