I have 5.5 years of experience mostly doing back-end work using C/C , Java, Kafka, Storm. I have good grasp of things that are covered in grokking the system design interview. I find all the theory covered in that book to be well within my reach. In my professional career, I had exposure to sharding, caching, etc.

I have a master's & bachelor's degree in CS as well. I have a fairly good grasp of CS fundamentals. I understand isolation levels in databases and stuff. I can explain how B trees work. I have a rough idea of databases work.

But DDIA is on a whole other level. It's almost research level. I want to understand all of that theory eventually over the next couple of years. But I've never read that book so far. I was not sure if I wanted to get into distributed systems that deep. Fresh out of college, I wanted to do ML and AI. Now I starting to take a liking in distributed systems. Maybe I will read that book in the future. But right now I don't have time.

Right now, I will have to start looking for a job urgently in the next couple of months. I have read through Grokking the system design interview. I have read a couple of chapters of Alex Xu's book. I have read a few research papers in the past(Kafka, HDFS, Chubby & either Cassandra or Big table). Is this enough for a E5/L5 role at FAANG or FAANG like companies? I am currently working at a FAANG level company. The only companies that will pay as much as my current job or FAANG level companies. I don't want to take a pay cut.

Realistically speaking even if I do read DDIA, is there a chance I get to talk about any of that theory in a 45 min interview. Cause the stuff in DDIA is really really very deep. All these things like SSTrees, Merkle tree, sloppy quorums and all, I can't imagine how I can steer conversation in that direction when all I am asked to do is design twitter news-feed or ticket master or something. Also I can't imagine an interviewer asking me about sloppy quorums in a 45 min interview with a straight face. But then again, I never interviewed for a E5/L5 position before. Are these things expected of someone with 5.5 years of experience? Honestly in all the companies I have worked so far I have never heard of any one talking about these things too. These things honestly feel like those stupid leetcode concepts we are forced to learn. Like iterating over submasks of a mask using bitwise operations. No practical value but have to learn them for interviews.