The product

Inside a Sherlock interview.

A room that reacts to every answer, and a debrief that tells you what to do next. Here's the whole thing, from first question to final score.

The room

Speak it or type it. The room keeps up.

Start any round when you're ready. Talk through your answer, write real code, and field follow-ups on the exact thing you just said.

Interview / Stripe / Senior Backend Engineerlive
S
Sherlock · interviewerDesign a URL shortener that serves 50k redirects a second. Where do you start?
You
You · spokenI'd split the write path from the read path, generate short keys with a counter plus base62, and cache the hot keys at the edge before the database sees them.
1def resolve(slug):
2 hit = cache.get(slug) # edge first
3 if hit: return hit
4 url = db.lookup(slug, "primary")
5 cache.set(slug, url, ttl=3600) # warm it
6 return url
S
Sherlock · follow-upThat warms the cache after the first miss. Under a traffic spike on a brand-new link, what stops every server from hitting the primary at once?

Real research

We learn how this company hires, so you practice the loop you'll actually sit, not a generic question bank.

Follow-ups, not scripts

It reads your answer and digs into the soft spot, the way a sharp interviewer would.

Scored against the bar

Scores set to the real bar for the level, with the reasoning shown. You see why, not just a number.

Spoken debrief

At the end you hear an honest, encouraging read of how it went, like a mentor walking you out.

A packet you keep

A PDF of scores, gaps, and stronger answers, to reread the night before the real one.

A free retake

Every round includes a retake, so a rough first run costs you nothing but the practice.

The debrief

Then it shows you the better answer.

The debrief doesn't just mark you down. It hands you the stronger version of what you said, so the fix is obvious.

What you said

“We used Kafka because it scales well and the team already knew it, so it made sense for the pipeline.”

Sharper

“We chose Kafka for durable replay and back-pressure under bursty load. We ruled out a direct queue because we needed to re-process a day of events after a bad deploy, and Kafka's retention made that a config change, not a rebuild.”

The interview packet, as a PDFscores, gaps, rewritten answers, and the debrief transcript, with every interview

Sit your first round.

Forward a role or paste a job description. Meet the dossier, the room, and your debrief.