A recruiter reached out to me through a resume board. After a phone screen with the recruiter, I went through two technical phone screen rounds. The first was a coding challenge, and the second focused on previous projects and behavioral questions.

Afterwards, they flew me from New York to San Francisco for the on-site. First, the recruiter gave me a tour. Their office is in a newly renovated building in SF. With the company's fast expansion, they're taking up a few more floors of the building. The office layout is very open and modern, with an assortment of snacks, drinks, and coffee. Since Samsara also builds its own hardware, I could see circuit boards and open wires of hardware components on people's desks. This really reminded me of MIT.

My on-site interviews actually started with a product demo. The company really cares that candidates get a good sense of what they're building. It's state-of-the-art truck fleet and production line monitoring hardware and software with computer vision. Then we moved onto coding, system design, a machine learning case, and a manager wrap-up.

One thing worth mentioning was the lunch. You sit down with an employee for lunch, but they will not submit an evaluation about you. One entire section of one of the floors is the cafeteria, which seats probably 150-200 people. They cater lunch and dinner every day. What caught my eye was the energy of the place. Lots of young people are there, and people were laughing – it seemed that they really liked being around each other. The highlight of the lunch was when my lunch buddy pointed out the CEO, who was wearing a hoodie and on the phone by the fridge. He looked very humble and unassuming. You wouldn't know he's the CEO unless someone pointed him out to you, yet he already sold a startup for more than $1 billion and Samsara is worth more than $3 billion, which is exactly why this scene impressed me.

During the offer stage, the recruiting team and the hiring manager were very patient and understanding because I had other on-sites scheduled. Their offer was very competitive with other big tech companies and unicorn startups.

Cannot disclose specifics, but expect a variety of interview formats, such as algorithm, system design, and machine learning case study.