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Senior Software Engineer Interview Experience

November 16, 2023
Negative ExperienceNo Offer

Process

The process was a recruiter call, a take-home exercise, several calls with various team members, and a call with a bunch of directors and the hiring manager.

The take-home task is not particularly hard, but it is very time-consuming if you want to get it right. The task description is ambiguous and full of grammar errors and typos. You are given 48 hours to complete it. I consider myself a very capable C++ programmer, and even for me it took over 20 hours to do it with tests, documentation, etc. Maybe I was overthinking, though.

After this, you have two to three different calls with your prospective team members. They will ask random questions about your background, the exercise, C++, and operating systems trivia. The last call is with a bunch of directors and the hiring manager. They are going to ask you questions about the type of work you like, your interactions with colleagues in the past, etc.

Throughout the process, they randomly reschedule the calls, so you have to be really flexible to make things work. If you have questions with regard to the exercise, they answer them with at least a day of delay, so chances are your deadline will be over by the time you get a meaningful answer. Since the interview with the directors, I got absolutely no response and I'm being ghosted. What could I say, it's very unprofessional and disrespectful.

Questions

  • Write a toy trading system from scratch in C++, with documentation, tests, and containerization.
  • Answer various questions about high-performance code and operating systems.

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Interview Statistics

The following metrics were computed from 35 interview experiences for the Kraken Senior Software Engineer role.

Success Rate

43%
Pass Rate

Kraken's interview process for their Senior Software Engineer roles is fairly selective, failing a large portion of engineers who go through it.

Experience Rating

Positive46%
Neutral14%
Negative40%

Candidates reported having mixed feelings for Kraken's Senior Software Engineer interview process.

Kraken Work Experiences