TCS
Large multinational IT services and consulting enterprise based in India.
3 Rounds
~14 Days
Medium
The Interview Loop
Recruiter Screen (30 min)
Standard fit check, behavioral questions, and resume overview.
Technical Loop (3-4 Rounds)
Deep dive into domain knowledge, coding, and system design.
Interview Question Bank
Backend Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design an API Rate Limiter for a public-facing TCS client portal to prevent DDoS attacks.
#Security
#Algorithms
#Caching
Backend Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
How would you design a distributed cache for a global e-commerce application?
#Caching
#Redis
#Distributed Systems
Backend Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a URL Shortener service like Bitly. How do you ensure the generated short URLs are unique?
#Hashing
#Scalability
#Database Design
Backend Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Explain the Saga design pattern. How do you handle rollbacks in a distributed transaction?
#Microservices
#Distributed Transactions
#Event Driven
Backend Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a notification service that sends Email, SMS, and Push notifications to millions of users.
#Asynchronous Processing
#Message Queues
#Scalability
Backend Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a high-throughput transaction processing system for a retail banking client. How do you handle data consistency?
#Distributed Systems
#ACID
#Microservices
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a serverless data processing pipeline on GCP or AWS that triggers when a CSV file is uploaded, validates the data, and loads it into a data warehouse.
#Serverless
#Data Pipeline
#Event-Driven Architecture
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design an authentication and authorization flow for a microservices-based application using API Gateway and Identity Providers.
#Security
#Microservices
#OAuth/OIDC
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
How would you design a zero-downtime database migration from an on-premise Oracle database to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL?
#Database Migration
#AWS DMS
#Zero Downtime
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
A TCS client has a monthly AWS bill of $500,000 and wants to reduce it by 20%. Walk me through your architectural and operational approach to Cloud Cost Optimization (FinOps).
#FinOps
#Cost Optimization
#AWS
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a centralized logging and monitoring solution for a hybrid cloud environment (on-premise VMs and Azure AKS).
#Observability
#Logging
#Hybrid Cloud
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
A healthcare client requires a Disaster Recovery (DR) setup with an RPO of 15 minutes and an RTO of 1 hour. How would you design this across two cloud regions?
#Disaster Recovery
#RTO/RPO
#Architecture
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a highly available, fault-tolerant 3-tier web application architecture on AWS for a global e-commerce client expecting massive traffic spikes during Black Friday.
#AWS
#High Availability
#Scalability
#Architecture
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design an Azure Data Factory (ADF) pipeline to perform a daily incremental load (Delta load) from an on-premise SQL Server to Azure Synapse Analytics.
#Azure Data Factory
#ETL
#Incremental Load
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design an end-to-end data pipeline for a retail client that generates 10TB of POS transaction data daily. The data needs to be available for BI reporting by 8 AM every day.
#ETL
#Batch Processing
#Architecture
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
How do you handle 'late-arriving data' in a daily batch ETL pipeline? For example, data from Monday arrives on Wednesday.
#ETL
#Data Quality
#Architecture
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Explain the difference between Lambda and Kappa architectures. Which one is more prevalent in modern cloud data engineering?
#Architecture
#Streaming
#Batch Processing
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Explain the Medallion Architecture in Databricks. What specific transformations happen between the Bronze, Silver, and Gold layers?
#Databricks
#Data Lakehouse
#Architecture
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a data migration strategy for a client moving 500TB of historical data from an on-premise Hadoop cluster to AWS S3 / Azure Data Lake.
#Cloud Migration
#AWS
#Azure
#Architecture
Data Scientist
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a predictive maintenance system for a manufacturing client to predict machine failures before they occur.
#Predictive Maintenance
#IoT
#Time Series
#Classification
Data Scientist
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a churn prediction pipeline for a telecom client. What features would you create and what model would you choose?
#Churn Prediction
#Feature Engineering
#Pipeline Design
Data Scientist
•
System Design
•
hard
How would you design a real-time recommendation system for a global e-commerce client?
#Recommendation Engines
#Collaborative Filtering
#Real-time Processing
#Scalability
Data Scientist
•
System Design
•
hard
A client wants to implement a Generative AI solution to query their internal PDF documents. How would you architect this?
#GenAI
#RAG
#Vector Databases
#LLMs
DevOps Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a Blue-Green deployment strategy for a monolithic application being migrated to AWS. How do you handle database schema changes during the switch?
#AWS
#Blue-Green Deployment
#Database Migration
DevOps Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a disaster recovery strategy for a production Kubernetes cluster hosted on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
#Azure
#Kubernetes
#Disaster Recovery
Frontend Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a scalable file upload component that supports drag-and-drop, progress bars, chunking for large files, and resumable uploads.
#File Handling
#Network Requests
#UX
Frontend Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design an autocomplete search bar component for an e-commerce site. Consider network latency, caching, and race conditions.
#Component Design
#Debouncing
#Caching
Frontend Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design the frontend architecture for a real-time stock trading dashboard. Focus on data fetching, state management, and performance.
#WebSockets
#Real-time Data
#Architecture
Frontend Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
A major retail client at TCS wants to migrate their monolithic frontend to a Micro-frontend architecture. How would you architect this?
#Micro-frontends
#Webpack Module Federation
#Scalability
Frontend Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
How would you implement offline support for a web application used by field workers with intermittent internet connectivity?
#Service Workers
#PWA
#IndexedDB
Full Stack Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design an e-commerce shopping cart system. How would you handle inventory reservation during the checkout process to prevent overselling?
#Concurrency
#Database Locks
#E-commerce
Full Stack Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a scalable notification system that sends emails, SMS, and push notifications to millions of users.
#Message Queues
#Scalability
#Asynchronous Processing
Full Stack Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Explain the Saga design pattern. How would you implement distributed transactions across multiple microservices?
#Microservices
#Distributed Systems
#Transactions
Full Stack Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a rate limiter for a public-facing REST API. What algorithms would you consider?
#API Design
#Algorithms
#Redis
Full Stack Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
How would you design a URL shortener service like Bitly? Focus on the database schema and read/write scaling.
#Scalability
#Database Design
#Hashing
Machine Learning Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a batch prediction pipeline that scores 50 million customer records every night to predict churn. The data resides in an AWS S3 data lake.
#Batch Processing
#Cloud Architecture
#PySpark
#AWS
Machine Learning Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a scalable architecture for a customer churn prediction model that needs to be retrained weekly with the latest transactional data.
#Continuous Training
#Pipeline Orchestration
#Classification
Machine Learning Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a personalized product recommendation engine for an e-commerce client. How do you handle the 'cold start' problem for new users and new products?
#Recommendation Systems
#Collaborative Filtering
#Cold Start
Machine Learning Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design an end-to-end ML system for real-time credit card fraud detection. The system must process 5,000 transactions per second with sub-50ms latency.
#Real-time Processing
#Streaming
#Fraud Detection
#Architecture
Machine Learning Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a pipeline to automatically extract key entities (Vendor Name, Invoice Date, Total Amount) from scanned PDF invoices for an accounting client.
#OCR
#NLP
#Information Extraction
#Pipeline Design
Product Manager
•
System Design
•
hard
Your B2B product currently supports 10 enterprise clients, but sales just signed 90 more to be onboarded in the next 6 months. How do you scale the product and team?
#Scaling
#Onboarding
#B2B
Product Manager
•
System Design
•
hard
A healthcare client wants to migrate their on-premise patient data system to AWS. Design a migration strategy that ensures zero downtime and strict data integrity.
#Cloud Migration
#Healthcare
#Data Integrity
Product Manager
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a rate-limiting strategy for a B2B API to prevent abuse while ensuring premium clients get their guaranteed throughput.
#APIs
#Rate Limiting
#B2B
Product Manager
•
System Design
•
hard
Design the high-level system architecture for an online assessment platform like TCS iON that needs to handle 100,000 concurrent users during a national exam.
#Scalability
#High Availability
#EdTech
Product Manager
•
System Design
•
medium
Design an AI-powered chatbot for an enterprise IT helpdesk to reduce L1 support tickets by 40%.
#AI/ML
#Chatbots
#Enterprise IT
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
In a microservices architecture, how do you handle transaction management across multiple independent services?
#Microservices
#Distributed Systems
#Saga Pattern
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a scalable URL shortener service like Bitly. Focus on the database schema and the algorithm used to generate the short URL.
#Scalability
#Database Design
#Hashing
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
How would you design an e-commerce checkout system that can handle massive spikes in traffic during a flash sale without crashing?
#High Availability
#Message Queues
#Load Balancing
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a centralized logging and monitoring system for a distributed microservices architecture.
#Observability
#Logging
#Microservices
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
What is the API Gateway pattern in Microservices? What cross-cutting concerns does it handle?
#Microservices
#API Gateway
#Security
Difficulty Radar
Based on recent AI-sourced data.
Meet Your Interviewers
The "Standard" Interviewer
Senior EngineerFocuses on core competencies, system constraints, and clear communication.
SimulateUnwritten Rules
Think Out Loud
Always explain your thought process before writing code or drawing architecture.