- Company: Akamai
- Experience: 11
- Interview Date: 2026-07-29
Round 1 : Behavioral/Managerial/HR
- Explain recent project in detail
- Roles and responsibilities
- Technical capabilities
Round 2 : HLD
- The Core Fundamentals of TLS How does TLS work when connecting to an HTTPS website, what does the protocol guarantee, and why do we believe it? Key takeaway: TLS provides confidentiality, integrity, and authentication through an asymmetric key exchange (Diffie-Hellman) that establishes a temporary symmetric key (AES-GCM) for the session.
- Validating Trust in Certificates How can we trust the certificate presented by the server? Key takeaway: Browsers verify certificates using a 4-step checklist: domain matching, expiration dates, cryptographic signatures chaining back to pre-installed Root CAs, and proof of private key possession.
- Self-Signed vs. Public Certificate Authorities The Question: Why wouldn't people trust a certificate I create for my own website, and what does a commercial CA do differently? Key takeaway: Math alone isn't enough; identity verification matters. Self-signed certificates lack an audited third-party signature and are missing from browser Root Stores, whereas CAs perform Domain Control Validation (DCV) and undergo strict security audits.
- Digital Signatures Mechanics How does a certificate get its CA signature, and what does the presence of that signature guarantee? Key takeaway: A website sends a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) to a CA, which hashes the data and encrypts that hash using the CA's private key. Its presence mathematically guarantees zero tampering (integrity) and verified identity (authenticity).
- Certificate Impersonation & Private Key Proof If I steal a website's public certificate and present it to a client, can I impersonate that server? Why can't I forge the signature? Key takeaway: No. While you can copy the public certificate (and its static CA signature), you cannot generate the live handshake signature required during the connection without access to the server's private key.
- TLS vs. Mutual TLS (mTLS) Why would someone choose to use Mutual TLS (mTLS) over standard TLS? Key takeaway: Standard TLS only authenticates the server to the client (one-way). mTLS requires both the client and server to present cryptographic certificates, making it ideal for zero-trust microservice communication, IoT devices, and strict B2B integrations.
Round 3 : DSA Round
- Maximum Product of Two Elements: How do you find the maximum product of any two distinct elements in an unsorted array of integers, ensuring the solution accounts for negative numbers in O(N) time complexity? -Python3
- Total Covered Length of Intervals: Calculate total interval length. Implement a function that calculates the total length from the list of intervals. So, it if it is [10, 30], [15, 60], [60, 70].- answer will be 60 Follow up on above Given a list of interval objects with start and end points, how do you calculate the total unique distance covered without double-counting overlapping or touching regions? Given a list of interval objects representing continuous numerical ranges, write a function total_covered_length that computes the total length of unique distance covered. If any intervals overlap or touch at boundaries (e.g., [10, 30] and [15, 60]), the overlapping range must be merged so that shared regions are counted only once. Input: intervals = [[10, 30], [15, 60], [60, 70]] Output: 60 Explanation: - [10, 30] and [15, 60] merge into [10, 60]. - [10, 60] and [60, 70] touch at boundary 60 and merge into [10, 70]. - Total length = 70 - 10 = 60.
- Security questions: MTLS PKI
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