The interview process begins with an initial call with an HR representative to discuss your professional experience. During this call, you can expect HR-related questions.

Following the HR call, you will be assigned a technical test. This test involves building an API with various endpoints, some of which are intentionally broken or missing. Familiarity with the Sequelize ORM is required. To pass this phase, ensuring the project is linted and organized into an MVC-inspired structure (controller, models, repositories, services, etc.) is recommended.

The third phase is an interview with a technical interviewer. In my experience, the interviewer's limited English proficiency made communication difficult. They also appeared disengaged, which decreased my enthusiasm for joining the company. I worried about potentially joining their team and quickly becoming bored.

During this interview, the technical interviewer will review your technical test and ask questions about potential improvements to the application. The number of questions is influenced by how well you structured your project.

I was ultimately eliminated after being asked a question about concurrency. I believed I had already addressed this in the application, so it wasn't at the forefront of my mind. (A potential answer would have been to implement table locking to prevent simultaneous requests from affecting the same table.) My basic knowledge of SQLite led me to believe that lock operations occurred automatically during transaction initiation.

My conclusion is that the main challenge in the third phase is discerning the interviewer's underlying intent. However, seeking clarification can be misinterpreted as a lack of knowledge.

Do not be discouraged if you do not pass. Despite having over 10 years of experience, I was unsuccessful. Success can sometimes depend on luck and having a supportive interviewer.

Why do you want to work at Deel?

As the project grows, what changes would you make to prevent it from becoming a mess?

If two requests are done at the same time, how would you address concurrency?