Taro Logo

Data Engineer Interview Experience - San Francisco, California

March 7, 2026
Positive ExperienceNo Offer

Process

I applied on the website.

  • Round 1 (AI interview): The interviewer asked about me, asked me to design a URL shortener, which I explained, and asked how I would handle deletions in it.
  • Round 2: There was a take-home assignment.
  • Round 3: They took this round for all of the people at once and told us to optimize the code for throughput. In the end, they asked how the interview process was. All the people praised it, and I yelled at them that it's not nice.
  • Round 4: We were given an object structure where data is present in S3, and we need to ingest it into a database and optimize the search calculation (12kB per candidate, 1024 embeddings, 4kb (total - 4bytes * 1024), 500 million candidates). They asked some questions: which is costly, storing in RAM or querying? RAM is cheap, so how can we effectively get it? How can we get distributed search from Turbopuffer? How do we shard the database, since sharding won't help in searching? Retrieving from S3 is not that simple; network crashes, worker crashes, and all kinds of stuff happen. How can I get data from continents like Asia if I had only sharded via country?

Verdict: They haven't responded. Take it as rejected.

Questions

At last, they asked me about my experience in my previous company. There is a team in the company that is kind of near to my previous work, so he told me that he will forward my resume to them.

Was this helpful?

Interview Statistics

The following metrics were computed from 2 interview experiences for the Mercor Data Engineer role in San Francisco, California.

Success Rate

0%
Pass Rate

Mercor's interview process for their Data Engineer roles in San Francisco, California is extremely selective, failing the vast majority of engineers.

Experience Rating

Positive50%
Neutral50%
Negative0%

Candidates reported having very good feelings for Mercor's Data Engineer interview process in San Francisco, California.

Mercor Work Experiences