SWE II Interview Experience - San Francisco, California
Process
My overall experience was good. The hiring manager was friendly and helpful, and gave me the impression that the team truly respected engineers.
A lot of interactions occurred during the system design round and presentation. It felt very nice talking to the senior people at Brex. However, the coding section was conducted by a mid-level engineer, and the interviewer was not as friendly.
A friendly suggestion for the debugging round: I was using Java and ran the testing program successfully in my local environment, but still had difficulty setting up the program during the interview. The actual program in the debugging round used new features from a later JDK version that were not used by the testing program. This might lead to environment-specific issues in the interview, even if you ran the testing program successfully.
Stripe has a similar but more mature debugging section. You don't need to worry about environment setup as long as you ran the testing program successfully. I hope the Brex team can improve their debugging interviews and provide better interviewing experiences.
Questions
Signed NDA, but more related to practical coding, not LC related.
Was this helpful?
Interview Statistics
The following metrics were computed from 1 interview experience for the Brex SWE II role in San Francisco, California.
Success Rate
Brex's interview process for their SWE II roles in San Francisco, California is extremely selective, failing the vast majority of engineers.
Experience Rating
Candidates reported having very good feelings for Brex's SWE II interview process in San Francisco, California.
Brex Work Experiences
- 5.0Strong Leadership, Flexible WorkSenior Software Engineer • Current EmployeeSan Francisco, California, United StatesFebruary 2, 2022Pros: - Very strong leadership in terms of strategy and vision, communication/transparency, competency, and humility. Large decisions are well-thought through and communicated. This trickles down to managers too, which I’ve found to be very good at Brex. - It’s been very clear what’s expected of me. I spend most of my day doing writing code, reviewing PRs, and writing design docs. - Brex was among the first to announce a permanent remote-first approach during the pandemic. There are opportunities to work in office if you want it – either an actual Brex office if you’re located in a hub, or WeWork if not. We also hold fully paid remote team off-sites twice a year to allow for team bonding. - Monthly WFH stipend to spend on whatever enhances your WFH life. - Pick your split on salary/RSU distribution.Cons: Tight timelines can be stressful. It has been more of a norm for me to work outside of 9-6 than an outlier, but I do this myself; no one’s chasing me to work late or on weekends. Given the recent initiatives, it’s understandable, but it’s not sustainable. Leadership has called this out as a problem to fix. Quite a few teammates at the company exhibit very obvious gender bias. This is not unique to tech, unfortunately, and I’m not sure if it’s specific to my team, but it’s a problem.
- 1.0They were indeed not the next "Zuckerbergs"Senior Software Engineer • Former EmployeeSan Francisco, California, United StatesSeptember 14, 2024Pros: Used to give high base salaries.Cons: The leadership, especially the CEOs, are sorely lacking and uninspiring. They turned a once great company that used to have some of the best talent in Silicon Valley into a toxic place that is a laughing stock. There wasn't enough scope for all the talented people here and they really let Ramp eat Brex up. I'm now at a company that uses Ramp and am amazed that they were able to build a better product with a third of the amount of people at Brex. That shows you the quality of leadership at Brex.
- 5.0Bumpy after layoffs, but overall a solid companySenior Software Engineer • Current EmployeeSan Francisco, California, United StatesNovember 26, 2024Pros: - Competent and solid people - Competitive compensation - Good leaders in some placesCons: - After two large RIFs in the past two years, affecting mostly engineering, morale has yet to fully recover. - Lack of growth opportunities at more senior levels.
Brex Interview Questions
