I was contacted by one of their sourcers after applying. The initial email contained some basic questions and an overview of the process. After confirming my interest, I was sent a HackerRank test invite – which should have been a red flag for a Principal Engineer role, even before a call with a recruiter. Following this, a technical phone screen was scheduled, which was a live coding test.

Finally, I received a call from the recruiter. She mentioned a bit about the process and asked me about my current salary and expectations. This felt a bit premature, in my opinion. The salary range quoted was a standard Senior SWE salary in Bangalore, much lower than a Principal or Staff Engineer salary. Anyway, I was interested in talking to the people as I had heard nice things about the company and its culture.

I had five interview rounds scheduled over two days via Zoom. I enjoyed my conversations with four out of the five interviewers. I was surprised to meet an Engineering Manager in my only coding round. It was quite clear that this person was not at all experienced in conducting coding interviews or gauging signals from a senior candidate. I was asked a LeetCode-type question that required graphs. I described the solution and then set out to code. After finishing the methods, I was told to run it on CoderPad. This came as a surprise, especially 35 minutes into the interview. CS Engineers will know that it takes a bit of time and boilerplate to make a running code for graph problems with input, and none of this was prepared by the interviewer. I spent another 10-12 minutes just to piece together code that could be run, and the allotted 45 minutes was over, so the interviewer stopped me.

It has been three weeks, and I haven't heard a peep from the recruiter. Seeing as how inflated the Principal Engineer title is and the low compensation, I didn't really bother following up again.

For others' reference, at Twilio, the Principal Engineer role maps to a standard L5 engineer in the industry with a little less pay, and I'd guess Staff maps to L4.

A variant of finding a Hamiltonian path in a graph.