I applied online. The process took 8 weeks.

The interview process I went through was broken up into several parts: 1. Initial ~30min screening call. Nothing out of the ordinary here, mostly just ensuring the job role was right for both parties, talking about experience, salary expectations, etc. 2. 1hr interview with an engineering director, going over my area of interest & expertise, how I'd solve specific problems, etc. 3. 1hr interview with potential colleagues. A coding challenge was presented in this interview (for a take-home project) and was then opened up for questions & discussion. At least for me, the coding challenge was not an overwhelming amount of work given the allowed timeframe. 4. 1hr interview with potential colleagues. This time was spent going over the coding challenge, while talking about a variety of topics like design patterns, reliability, scalability, what could have been done differently, etc.

1. 1hr interview with a potential colleague & manager. This went over observability, performance issues, troubleshooting, and a variety of other topics. 6. 30min-1hr informal interview with an engineering executive. We covered a whole host of topics, but this was a very open, transparent discussion. In summary, while there were some textbook questions about certain scenarios, the interview process as a whole was quite a natural conversation. There were plenty of opportunities to ask questions about day-to-day work, leadership, how the company handles certain things, culture, transparency, and so forth. Throughout the process, I was kept up to date by a technical recruiter, even outside of normal working hours at times. Everyone at Kong truly wanted to ensure I was being placed on the right team, not just to help them grow, but myself as well.

How would you go about diagnosing performance problems in production (among many other observability questions)?

What are your opinions on database modeling & performance considerations?

What are the common concurrency/parallelism design patterns, and how would one go about implementing them?