The interview process included:

• A hiring manager call.
• A take-home programming assignment.
• A virtual onsite consisting of five interviews:
  • A review of the take-home project.
  • A behavioral conversation.
  • A product manager discussion.
  • A system design interview.
  • A director chat, followed by a recruiter chat to wrap up.

Each interview, except for the recruiter talk and the PM discussion, had two interviewers. Overall, this is a really good process for several reasons.

First, let me talk about having a take-home assignment. I seem to be in the minority, but as a hiring manager myself, I think this is a significantly superior method of tech screening a candidate than some LeetCode-like 45-minute live coding exercise. There are so many reasons why that kind of interview is bad, but I'll stick to the two most important: it does not in any way show coding ability, and in fact, you have to suppress good coding habits to solve the problem in the time allotted. If you even think about error handling, writing tests (forget about TDD), validating input, or building for extensibility and readability, you will not have enough time to "solve" the problem, and you will likely get rejected.

Secondly, these types of problems are flat-out ageist. I have decades of software development experience that has trained me to think about how to ship production code, and I am given a test like a kid out of college does in their CS classes, something you can cram to ace? Carta understands these issues, and I was able to write a well-designed piece of software that I was proud of, exemplifying my ability. That was huge. And many of the concerns that one would have about a take-home test are resolved by having one of the onsite interviews go over the code, since it gives you a chance to talk about how you would improve the code given more time, and the company can see that you didn't just get someone else to write it for you.

I also like how the onsite interviews had multiple people on them, giving me access to a good number of engineers in the company. Also big. Remember, a candidate is also interviewing the company, right?

I did well in all but one of the interviews, and the market is very competitive. So, despite the fact that they liked me, I did not get an offer.

The take-home test involved processing a CSV file to produce a result.

This is very related to work done at the company, so you can expect questions around how you would make it more efficient, handle different kinds of data, and manage scale.

Live interview questions were typical, such as:

• Giving an example of helping to level someone up.
• Examples of when you found a bug in the code.
• How you foster communication between teams.