I applied online and was contacted by a recruiter very soon after. He was very nice and told me about the company in some detail. He then proceeded to inform me that there was a coding challenge I had to complete before applying.

I agreed to do the challenge and received the details.

For the challenge, you get to pick one of a few applications they want you to build. They state it should only take about 4 hours, but I actually worked on it for the better part of 2 days and still felt like I was missing details when I reviewed the code during the phone screen.

The phone screen is a 40-minute interview about the code you wrote. I got the impression they were expecting a much more thorough job than the challenge suggests. In retrospect, I would have taken care of a lot more of my TODOs.

My coding challenge required calculating the nearest transit stop given a current location. They asked for an efficient way to do this.

The answer ended up being something I was not familiar with: MongoDB and its built-in geo-location database functions.