1. Informational call with a recruiter - great experience, very nice guy and knowledgeable. I didn't know much about The Trade Desk before, but he was able to ignite a spark and make me want to learn more.

2. Take home assignment. I got a mini project to build a caching library at home whenever it works for me. I dedicated the weekend (5-6 hours daily) to understand the requirements, design the solution, write the code along with the tests, and write up the documentation.

I can't stress enough how important it is to make sure you understand the requirements and clarify the unknowns before writing your code. I had a few questions to clarify, sent these over, and got a prompt reply in 2 days. Made some adjustments based on feedback and submitted the solution.

Received feedback that my solution looks great and got scheduled for a video call to discuss the solution in detail. It was a little bit more than an hour conversation, where you get to talk about your solution, the trade-offs you chose, and usage scenarios.

Honestly, I enjoyed this screening much, much better than a phone call experience where a lot of external factors are in play (communication quality, interviewer accent, his/her mood, etc.). It happened to me before to get an interviewer whom I couldn't understand over the phone, and obviously, it didn't go well because of that. Here, you get a task which you can work on without any pressure and get a great opportunity to do your best and shine.

For me, it was also a great learning, as I didn't know some of the aspects about caching that were needed to work out the solution. (I don't want to discuss the details of the problem and my solution as I signed a waiver not to publish it)

1. On-site interview. It is called an on-site interview, but I was a bit surprised to find out that most of my interviews in reality were video conferences from their office conference room. I've got a few interruptions during the video call, which was the only part of the experience that wasn't great. The connection was restored quickly within just a few minutes, but I can imagine this throwing off an inexperienced candidate.

I looked at it more philosophically (recalling cases when some companies intentionally do such things to check how candidates perform under stressful conditions) and kept calm and went on coding until the interviewer returned.

The problems asked by interviewers were mostly down-to-earth and useful things that you would encounter during your work. E.g., write a distributed data query, extend an existing solution to resolve a concurrency issue, design a distributed service that does "something". Only one of the asks was to solve a logical puzzle, but it didn't require any specific algorithm or data structure knowledge and was fun.

Just 1 (out of 4) interviews were a local whiteboard session, and the rest were on a shared coding screen, which I prefer better because you can erase and fix issues as you see them with less hassle.

Overall, it was fun and engaging. All the interviewers were great people, and I got a chance to ask questions and learn more about the company.

1. Got an offer decision within a few days and chose to take it instead of other 2 I had from much bigger and well-known companies.