The interview process started with a typical HR/corporate recruiter screening.

From there, the process was broken out into 6 interviews: the first three with technical staff and the last three with management. All interviews were conducted over Zoom.

For the technical interviews, the questions ranged from questions about my background, free-form discussions about coding and languages, some coding exercises, and architectural design questions. The coding exercises were all very straightforward and practical, centering around things like executing HTTP requests and sorting/filtering/grouping data. The design/architectural questions were also very fun and practical.

The management interviews were more traditional behavioral questions, although one of these also ended up getting very technical. Towards the end, they mostly sought to make sure you were a good cultural fit, which is especially important considering Elastic's distributed nature.

Overall, I think the process was very fair and geared towards finding engineers who can solve real-world problems, rather than fresh CS grads who study Google interview algorithm questions. My only complaints are that the process itself is rather long (it took me about 6 weeks), and pay was not really discussed until the end of the process. In my opinion, this should be discussed in the initial HR screening to help prevent anyone from wasting their time.

Given a few curl commands that call a RESTful service fetching data, choose a programming language, download the data, and then filter, group, and sort it a few different ways.

Discussion about how you would go about designing and building a hypothetical high-volume web service.