This was for a remote position in the Tokyo office.

The stages were as follows:

• Back-and-forth with HR
• Screening interview with Karat on DSAA
• Code review interview
• System design interview
• Resume discussion
• Two rounds of coding/algorithms interviews
• Closing interview
• If above passed, team matching interviews

Stages 3-6 are not necessarily done in that order. They were done on Zoom, and you could choose to do them all on one day or split them over two days.

Karat interviews are the absolute worst part of the process. You must pass at least 2/3 LeetCode medium problems within 1 hour, with no exceptions. You can get screened out here just by being unlucky and getting a problem you aren't familiar with.

In my experience, HR was very friendly, cooperative, and transparent. They shared what to expect at each stage as a candidate and what the interviewers would be expecting from me. The interviews themselves held true to what HR shared, and it genuinely felt like every interviewer was there to help me succeed.

At the end, I was told that I would be a hire, met a hiring manager, and was told that they would be working on an offer.

This is where things went downhill. It seems they were running into restructuring issues, like many other tech companies recently, and were unable to actually secure a position for me. After 2 months of going back-and-forth with HR for updates, I was finally given the concrete decision that, at the end of all of that, there was no room to hire me at the current time.

To their credit, they absolutely did not string me along. HR advised me early on that a hiring decision was not the same as a job offer, and to keep up my processes with other companies, even despite the hire decision.

It's just a shame, as I was quite excited to work here after such an amazing experience with the interviews and meeting such wonderful people during the process.

Karat interviews featured simple DSAA and medium-level LeetCode questions. One question involved BFS/DFS. The last question, which I did not solve, seemed like a DP question.

System design involved designing the architecture for a service based on a mock feature, pertaining to a real business scenario for Indeed's products.

Code review involved reviewing a very small repo with a few files. One thing to note is that although the code was in my language of choice, the repo also included some HTML/CSS templates which were also to be reviewed.

Coding interviews had interviewers present a mock 'real-world' problem and ask you to solve it via a function. This was a very interesting style, as it not only involved some DSAA to solve but also allowed for discussion of requirements, constraints, and assumptions based on the scenario.