This is a very long process with 6 steps in total:

• Recruiter

• Engineering Manager

• System Design

• Communications & Collaboration

• Pair Programming

• Code Review

• Recruiter - Basic questions about your trajectory and why you want to work at HashiCorp.

• Engineering Manager - Behavioral questions. Ask if you read the HashiCorp principles and which principles you liked more and why.

• System Design - Design an elevator system. It's not an interview to design a distributed system; it's more focused on OO.

• Communications & Collaboration - Behavioral questions, almost the same as the Engineering Manager interview.

• Pair Programming - The challenge is to create code to simulate a database with transactions in memory. You don't touch the code; you just speak. This doesn't make sense for a Pair Programming interview.

• Code Review - Code review a PR of fake code on GitHub.

There is little time for questions about the company, just 5 minutes at the end. There is no set of expectations about what to expect at each step of the process.

They said that you don't need to study LeetCode questions but asked you to implement (in fact, asked you to say what the interviewer should implement) transactions in the Pair Programming interview.

In the System Design interview, they don't provide any way to draw the design; it is up to you.

In the Engineering Manager and Communications & Collaboration stages, they ask practically the same questions. This could be optimized for just one interview.

The Pair Programming interview didn't make any sense since the interviewee doesn't touch the code. There's a non-trivial challenge in implementing transactions, but there's little time to solve since the first part is to write some simple code. They say it doesn't matter if you don't finish on time, but they charge you to do all the requirements, and sometimes they don't let you think about which option is the best for that problem.

The interviewer's microphone was very bad, and it was very difficult to understand what she was saying.

In code review, you don't have enough time to review everything because the code in the PR is very bad.

Five days after the interviews, I received a default message that they decided to move forward with other candidates. I asked for structured feedback, but I never received it. The funny part about it is they sent a form for me to provide feedback about the hiring process.

Tips:

• Read HashiCorp Principles and TAO of HashiCorp.
• Think about career situations that match the behavioral questions.
• Watch videos about creating an elevator system on YouTube.
• Try to implement code that simulates a database in memory and has transactions (begin, commit, rollback).
• Read about Code Review best practices.

Behavioral questions

• Why do you want to work at HashiCorp?
• Tell me two HashiCorp principles you like more. Why?
• Tell me about a situation when you disagreed with a team member.
• Tell me about a situation when your team needed to choose between implementing two critical features.
• What is your process for learning something that you need to work on?