Applied online.

Contacted via email by a recruiter in a couple of days, inviting me to meet with their Head of Engineering.

The first meeting was more of a cultural pre-screen to decide whether to bring the candidate for the next round of interviews. The recruiter was prompt in scheduling interviews (the candidate had the option to select the interview date) and kept me in the loop throughout the process.

What I found really helpful was a LinkedIn link within each invite, showing the people I would be interviewing with. This helped me get to know them beforehand. A really good recruitment practice – kudos!

Round 1: Pre-screen with the Head of Engineering. Questions were more management-style related. Duration: 30 minutes. Not difficult. I had a good conversation with him.

Round 2: Two technical rounds.

• The first technical interview focused on system design.
• The second was a coding exercise.

Both were of average difficulty – not hard. Each interview lasted one hour. The technical interviews felt impersonal. Some coaching for the technical staff on how to conduct interviews is needed. They need to remember that candidates are also evaluating the culture and the people they will end up working with. I would have probably declined the offer if I had received one based on my technical interviews.

Round 3: 2 hours of management interview – all leadership and project management questions.

Round 4: With the CTO – a mix of technical and leadership questions.

The system design question was around spatial search. Given a latitude/longitude position on a map, find the top K closest locations to that point.

The coding question was a parser type question. Given loglines as a list of strings, parse each string and count user activity based on a set of rules (like a funnel).