Rafay Abbasi: Interview Coaching

Who the coach is

Rafay Abbasi is a co-founder of the platform. The coaches listing describes him as a former senior development lead at Meta and Microsoft; his background includes leading development on Azure Storage at Microsoft and working as a software engineer lead at Meta, building large-scale systems.

What sessions cover

• System design and distributed systems: architecture for scale, storage and data paths, consistency and replication, and how to present trade-offs.
• Data structures and algorithms: approach and communication in coding rounds.
• Interview strategy: preparation planning and reviewing past interviews.
• Leadership and management: for candidates at tech lead, principal engineer and solutions architect level.

Company-focused sessions cover Meta, Microsoft and Amazon loops.

Why a storage background helps in design rounds

A coach who has led development on production storage infrastructure can push on the parts of a design that many candidates pass over quickly: what the write path actually costs, how the system behaves when a replica falls behind, and what a consistency claim commits you to. Handling those follow-ups well is often what separates a senior answer from a mid-level one.

Booking and price

Sessions are booked through the coach's profile on the platform. The platform's mock interview page (September 2026) lists one-to-one coaching sessions from $149, or $215 with an interviewer from your target company, each shown as a discount from a higher list price and backed by a satisfaction money-back guarantee. Confirm the price for this coach on the booking page.

How to get the most from a session

• Bring a real interview: a recording or a detailed account of a round that did not go well, and ask directly what a hiring committee would have concluded.
• Bring a design you produced, ideally timed, so the session can go deep on your actual decisions.
• Prepare with the relevant course first, such as Grokking the System Design Interview or Grokking System Design Fundamentals, so the hour is spent on depth rather than basics.
• Leave with a prioritised list and schedule a follow-up mock interview to test the changes.

What you can expect afterwards

A clear view of how an experienced interviewer reads your design answers, the specific areas to deepen, and a plan to present trade-offs with more confidence.

Best for: engineers who keep reaching the onsite without converting it, and anyone whose system design answers need more depth.