I was guided and helped/advised throughout the whole process by the recruiter and the interviews coordinator, with frequent communication. Everyone I interacted with was kind to me. I ended up accepting the offer after the 5-step hiring process, as described below. The whole process took me 4-5 weeks, but it can be shortened if you have a lot of availability and don't need to practice.

First, I was approached on LinkedIn by a recruiter.

Following a first call of approximately 30 minutes with this recruiter, we decided to move forward. Since the next interview was a live coding session, I took 2-3 weeks to train algorithms and data structures, using LeetCode and reading "Cracking the Coding Interview" by Gayle Laakmann McDowell.

The live coding interview lasted 1 hour, split into two parts: 15 minutes where I talked about a project I worked on previously, then 45 minutes of live coding session. During this session, the interviewer introduced two problems (easy-medium). I managed to successfully finish the first one, but I struggled with the second one. Nonetheless, by communicating with the interviewer, I managed to progress toward a solution.

Next, I took a take-home project. It is recommended to complete it in 3-4 hours. Having some spare time, I decided to invest more time (roughly 7-8 hours) into it to deliver a polished project. I uploaded the result about 1 week after I was introduced to the project, but this delay wasn't an issue.

Then came a second live coding interview of 1 hour. I managed to successfully finish the challenge on time (easy-medium).

After that, I got a system design interview of 1 hour. To train, I read "System Design Interview" by Alex Xu.

Finally, I got a behavioral interview of 1 hour with hiring managers.

Since I already had ongoing offers from other companies, Datadog managed to propose me an offer very quickly.

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