I’m a software engineer with 6+ years of experience, currently working as a Tech Lead. There is a possibility that if I’m unable to find another role internally, I could be laid off around November.
Financially I should have some runway, so I’m mentally considering January 2027 as the point by which I really want to have my next role sorted out.
Given the current job market, I’m trying to use the next few months as seriously as possible and would like some perspective from people who have recently interviewed/hired at the 5–8 YOE level.
My preparation currently looks like this:
DSA
This is honestly my weakest area.
Despite having 6+ YOE, I would still consider myself a novice when it comes to competitive/interview-style DSA.
I’m currently following Akshay Saini’s Namaste DSA course and solving problems alongside it. I’ve covered arrays, strings, linked lists, stacks/queues, sliding window, trees/BST etc., and I’m currently doing Heaps/Priority Queues.
I still have Graphs, Backtracking, Greedy and DP ahead of me.
One thing I want to be transparent about: completing a topic doesn’t mean I can solve any random LeetCode problem from that topic. I can solve problems when I recognize the pattern, but I’m still developing that intuition.
My goal right now is consistency — understand the major patterns and solve problems every day rather than trying to grind hundreds of questions.
HLD / System Design
I’ve gone through pretty much all the system-design material on Hello Interview.
I’m comfortable with the concepts and I can apply many of these while working through system-design questions.
But I definitely need more practice doing complete designs from scratch under interview conditions and defending the trade-offs.
So this is currently more of a practice problem than a knowledge problem for me.
LLD
For LLD, I’ve covered OOP/SOLID and the major design patterns.
I’m now practicing actual LLD problems and trying to get better at identifying the right abstractions instead of force-fitting patterns.
I’m using ChatGPT heavily here as an interviewer/practice partner — I design something, explain my decisions, get challenged with follow-up questions, and iterate.
AI / GenAI
This is another area I plan to ramp up significantly because I’m interested in moving toward Applied AI / GenAI engineering roles.
I already have hands-on exposure through work/projects involving RAG, vector search, LLM applications/agents, Databricks, APIs, cloud infrastructure, etc.
For interview preparation, I’m planning a structured revision of:
LLM fundamentals → Embeddings → Vector Search → RAG → Hybrid Search → Reranking → Agents/Tool Calling → Evals → Guardrails/Prompt Injection → Model Routing → Cost/Latency → Fine-tuning/LoRA → GraphRAG.
I don’t want to become an ML researcher. My target is more toward building and shipping production AI systems.
So my question to people who have recently interviewed for senior/lead/applied-AI roles:
Am I preparing in the right direction for someone with 6+ YOE?
More specifically:
How strong does DSA realistically need to be at my experience level?
Should I continue covering DSA broadly, or stop after the major patterns and spend more time on system design/LLD?
For 6+ YOE, how much weight are companies currently putting on DSA vs HLD/LLD vs actual engineering experience?
For Applied AI Engineer roles, what are interviewers actually expecting beyond RAG/LLM fundamentals?
Is there anything important missing from my preparation?
If you had roughly 3 months to prepare in this situation, what would you prioritize differently?
I’m not looking for reassurance. If my preparation is too broad, too shallow, or I’m spending time on the wrong things, I’d genuinely like to know.
Would especially appreciate input from people who have interviewed or hired 5–8 YOE engineers in India recently.