Before Walmart happened, I had a whole lineup of interviews. Some were exciting, some were brutal, and some were just plain humbling. These are the ones I didn’t crack, but honestly, each one pushed me a little further in the right direction.

1. Couchbase — The One I Really Wantedh2

Couchbase was one of the few companies I genuinely wanted to crack. Their work in distributed systems, databases, and high-performance backend engineering was exactly the kind of tech I was into.

The Shortlisting They shortlisted around 100 students out of nearly 1,800. They weren’t looking for standard resumes; they wanted systems projects and technical depth. I got through purely on the strength of my projects, which felt great since I had zero prior experience.

Round 1: The Warm Up I was interviewed by the Server Team. Funnily enough, most of them were alumni from my college, which unintentionally added pressure even though they were super friendly. We covered a graph problem based on router chaining, some OS questions, and had a deep discussion about my project on unikernels. We also touched on concurrency—threads, mutexes, and how to compute the greatest number in a 40GB file. It was a solid round.

Round 2: The Crash This is where things went sideways.

I made a rookie mistake: I didn’t sleep enough the night before. I walked into the interview exhausted, and my brain just wasn’t firing.

The question was straightforward: Design a checkpointing database. I needed to handle get, put, and checkpoint endpoints. I tried a hash-map plus array approach. It worked, but the logic was flawed. I ended up replicating the entire array on every checkpoint, which is terrible for space usage. I should have traded off get speed for better checkpoint efficiency, but I just couldn’t see it in the moment.

The interviewer was kind and tried to nudge me, but I wasn’t sharp enough to pick up the hints.

The worst part? I went home, took a nap, and woke up realizing the optimal solution in about 20 minutes. That added salt to the wound—knowing I could have solved it if I’d just rested properly. They took about 15 people. I wasn’t one of them.

2. American Express — The Reality Checkh2

This one started smooth and ended abruptly.

Round 1 was chill. We talked about Big Data basics, VMs,simple light DSA umm ig it was Kadane’s algo, and the difference between SQL and NoSQL. We even discussed some behavioral stuff about handling odd working hours. I felt good.

Round 2 was a brutal reality check. I messed up the System Design portion. The interviewer asked me to design a high-level design (HLD) for LinkedIn and discuss sharding strategies without skewness. I struggled to structure my answer and got tangled up in the details. The interviewer quickly realized I was out of my depth on that specific topic.

Then came some random AWS questions, followed by the polite, “Do you have any questions for me?”—which is usually interview code for “this isn’t going well.”

3. Walmart Labs (SDE) — September 9, 2025h2

Yes — fun fact — my first Walmart interview was actually for the SDE role, not the cybersec one I eventually got.

Around 30 were shortlisted after the online test.

Round 1 — Resume + Kafkah3

• Kafka partitions, consumer groups, throughput

• Some project deep dive

Went well.

Round 2 — DSA + API Designh3

• Serialization: why we need it

• Serialize/deserialize a binary tree (classic LeetCode)

• Design an API that takes a movie name and returns cast details

• HTTP status codes

The only thing I fumbled: conditional variables

Still felt like my best performance so far.

Round 3 — HRh3

Very standard HR:

• Why this company

• Hobbies

• Family background

• Work scenarios

I walked out feeling confident.

The Result They took 5 out of the final 7 candidates. I was one of the 2 who didn’t make it.

I’m not going to lie—I cried when I got home. It stung because I thought I had it in the bag, and realizing that one small fumble on conditional variables probably cost me the offer was hard to swallow.

4. The Rapid Fire Roundh2

Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) This was actually a win. Two rounds of mixed technical and managerial questions, and I walked away with an offer. It was my first FTE offer, which was a huge relief.

NetApp This was a testing role. The interviewer seemed to prefer candidates with experience, and he wasn’t too impressed when I asked if it was possible to switch to dev later. He actually gave me some solid advice: it’s better to wait for a role you like than to get stuck in one you don’t. I didn’t move forward, but I appreciated the honesty.

Apple By the time Apple came around (October 15), I was burnt out. I already had the Walmart offer, and the specific role didn’t excite me much. I think the interviewer could tell my heart wasn’t fully in it.

What I Learned from Rejectionh2

Looking back at these “failures,” the patterns are obvious.

1. Sleep is non-negotiable. (Looking at you, Couchbase). Being sharp matters more than last-minute cramming.
2. System Design was a gap. I could manage HLD, but my Low-Level Design (LLD) wasn’t optimal.
3. Rejection builds resilience. That Walmart SDE rejection hurt. But it taught me that one interview doesn’t define you. A month later, I was back interviewing with the same company for a different role—and I got it.
4. Not every opportunity is the right one. NetApp’s interviewer did me a favor. Sometimes rejection is just protection from a role you wouldn’t have enjoyed anyway.

The companies I didn’t crack weren’t “better” or “worse” than the one I eventually joined. It often came down to timing, fit, and a little bit of luck.