Rafay Abbasi: Interview Coaching

Who this is

Rafay Abbasi is a co-founder of DesignGurus.io, currently at Amazon. He worked as a Senior Development Lead at Microsoft on Azure Storage and as a Software Engineer Lead at Meta, building large scale systems.

What he coaches on

System design and distributed systems, data structures and algorithms, interview strategy, and the leadership and management side, for roles at tech lead, principal engineer and solutions architect level. Company focused sessions cover Meta, Microsoft and Amazon.

Why the storage background is worth using

A coach who has led development on production storage infrastructure can push on the parts of a design most people wave through: what the write path actually costs, how the system behaves when a replica falls behind, what your consistency claim commits you to. That is usually where a senior candidate is separated from a mid level one.

Getting the most from a session

Bring a recording or a detailed account of a real interview that did not go well, and ask directly what a hiring committee would have concluded. Someone who has run hiring loops knows what goes on the feedback form, and it is rarely what candidates assume.

Best for: engineers who keep reaching the onsite and not converting it, and anyone whose system design answers stay at the level of boxes and arrows.