The initial interview was with an internal recruiter for a brief introduction and six JavaScript questions presented on slides, ranging from basic to mid-level. The interviewer corrected me on an answer about variable scope. I double-checked post-interview and found they were incorrect.

The recruiter seemed quite disinterested and stated that salary was dependent on performance in some Vanilla JS code tests. Even the top-end salary is less than average for similar roles in the current market.

The second interview was a one-hour live coding session via screen-share with a Canva engineer. They were friendly, and the tasks were tricky but not overly difficult. I managed to complete them within the required time; however, I received an email stating I was not successful.

The third round, if you make it, consists of three hours of more live coding challenges (all Vanilla JS) and a thirty-minute HR interview.

My overall impression of the process was that the company culture is poor. Compared to interview processes with other tech companies, Canva's is quite terrible.

In the tech industry, people often joke about companies creating unrealistic coding challenges that don't resemble real-life engineering, and Canva seems to have fallen into this trap.

It's a bit like interviewing airline pilots and hiring the one who completes the pre-flight check the fastest.

Initial questions covered basic JS variables, then Promises and execution context.

Second-round questions involved fetching data from endpoints, handling Promises, extracting data from nested objects, and recursive functions.