I applied online. The process took two months.

I applied for a Staff Software Engineer position and didn't hear anything for over a month. Then, out of nowhere, I received an email inviting me to continue to the technical interview on the CodeSignal platform. The platform itself is decent. It has a clean interface, and you can practice with sample exercises beforehand to get familiar with the environment. However, the coding environment is essentially a very limited version of VS Code. It lacks many of the features that developers rely on every day, including basic code autocompletion, making the experience less representative of a real development environment. The interview format is similar to a typical HackerRank-style coding challenge. You have ninety minutes to solve a problem that evolves through multiple stages. In my case, the challenge was to implement an in-memory database while keeping all existing tests passing as new requirements were introduced. The stages included:

• Basic CRUD operations.
• Scanning and filtering data.
• TTL (Time-To-Live) implementation.
• Versioning.

During the interview, you must keep your microphone and camera on, use only one monitor, and you are not allowed to use any external resources, including AI assistants. It's a very controlled environment. After spending an entire workday preparing and completing the assessment, I received a generic rejection email the very next morning. It was disappointing because the feedback contained no explanation about my performance or what I could improve. Considering the amount of time and effort required from candidates, I believe a more meaningful feedback process would provide a much better candidate experience. While I understand the need for standardized technical assessments, evaluating senior or staff-level engineers in such a constrained environment—with limited IDE capabilities and no opportunity to discuss architecture, design decisions, or real-world engineering trade-offs—doesn't seem like the best way to identify experienced professionals.

CodeSignal challenge: implement an in-memory database.