The process began with an initial call with a recruiter, which was purely behavioral. They asked about what I was looking for in a new role, why I was looking to leave, and what my ideal role would be.

Next, a tech screen was set up with a senior software engineer. I wasn't prepared for it. Just like anyone else who hasn't interviewed in a while, tech interviewing is a skill, and you may need a refresher if it's been some time.

I was given a prompt that was directly related to something I might do on the actual job, which I really enjoyed. The recruiter explained the prompt, which was quite long and took a while to explain. It's important to read it very carefully.

After setting up some initial code, the engineer pointed out that I had missed something in the prompt, and I began trying to change it. I asked all the right questions about clarifying which edge cases I needed to check, and he seemed pleased. He then suggested using recursion to cover the edge case in question. Since I've been primarily front-end in my current job and haven't done anything back-end in a while, my memory of recursion was a bit hazy. I had written out some code with my thought process based on what I remembered, but he pointed out that I just needed to add something small which I had completely missed.

It was at this point that we ran out of time. He made sure we had some time for me to ask him questions. I received a rejection email the next day, which I believe was due to not remembering recursion very well. I think the next step after this was the final onsite.

Overall, although I forgot recursion, the engineer was one of the most professional I've interviewed with, and the experience felt much more like a pair programming situation rather than an interview. Comparing how they train interviewers at my current job, I would say Affirm is a company other companies should look at when it comes to training engineers for interviewing. I'd also like to applaud Affirm for actually using questions that may be an on-the-job task you might have to do. Often, some companies ask silly, irrelevant things like "implement bubble sort," which is purely from a college CS textbook and has no relevance to how well you'll do on an actual job (whether you remember bubble sort or not).

This experience should be a good reminder for everyone that even if you may not use concept X or concept Y at your current or previous jobs, that doesn't mean you can't find success as an engineer. However, you will have to take a refresher on concepts like recursion.

Without being too specific about the tech question, it was a graph problem involving creating a class where one of the methods was finding a path inside the graph.