I was interviewed at the San Francisco office in September.

First round was a telephonic screening with their Director of Engineering. Second round was a take-home assignment which included some CSV parsing. Third round was a phone interview based on the take-home assignment.

Onsite interview consisted of 4 rounds:

• System design
• Coding interview
• Director of Product
• VP of Engineering

System design interview went well, and I was able to do well. The interviewers were onsite for this part of the interview. The coding interview was a Zoom meeting with two engineers from different offices and included coding on CoderPad. Communication was a little difficult as they were not onsite. It was strange that the coding interview was over Zoom for the onsite interview.

I was asked to pull some JSON data from Reddit and perform data manipulations on it as part of the interview. I tried to solve it using Java. Java does not have an in-built JSON parser, and I tried to import one, but CoderPad was not allowing the import. I lost close to 20 minutes trying to import the JSON parser and then switched to JavaScript, as it has an in-built JSON parser, to solve the problem. Even the interviewers tried to import different libraries for JSON parsing but were not successful.

The recruiter got back to me after a week and informed me that I did the system design well but did not do well on the coding interview.

It would be nice if the interviewers were also onsite for the onsite interviews and if they let me use an IDE instead of CoderPad when I am expected to import third-party libraries.

CSV parsing and JSON parsing