A recruiter reached out to me via email with some information about their company, asking if I'd be interested.

After looking over the information, they scheduled a phone call to answer any questions. After deciding to pursue it, they sent me an online assignment to be done whenever. It was similar to many other reviews here.

I spent a couple hours one night on it and turned it in. After a couple days, they said they liked it and scheduled a phone screen with one of their engineers. The person who interviewed me over the phone wasn't the person they said would be conducting the interview.

They've got profiles of all their employees on their website, so I did some snooping beforehand. The question they asked was a typical question you'd find in "Cracking the Coding Interview" and is mentioned a lot when discussing common interview questions. I was familiar with the problem and told the interviewer that, but he told me to go on with it anyway. I feel like I answered it alright, although later I saw some inefficiencies with it.

A couple days after that, the recruiter got back to me and said they wanted to bring me in for an in-person interview. I don't live near San Francisco, so they made all the arrangements to bring me in. They gave me a good overview of what would be in the interview, as far as types of questions and the format it would be in.

I had 4 technical interviews, one of which was a systems design problem, with the rest being coding challenges. I also had lunch with one of their co-founders and met for about 30 minutes with their director of engineering to discuss my experience.

The technical questions were challenging, but reading "Cracking the Coding Interview" would prepare you well for them. I felt like I did alright, but still stumbled on a couple parts. It was my first interview in a couple years, and I could have prepared more for it.

In the end, they declined to extend me an offer. They said they saw me as a culture fit but that I was lacking in some technical areas. I suspect it was mostly my unfamiliarity with their particular tech stack, but my stumbling in some of the technical questions surely didn't help.

Typical questions out of CTCI, for the most part.