A recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn regarding software development positions. I was in a position where I was open to new opportunities, having previously worked at Microsoft.

We talked, and the recruiter suggested a few teams that had openings. I was interested in a few (mail, ads & data, and cloud) and asked if I could do a phone screen with each of them to learn more about the individual groups. The recruiter happily accommodated.

I passed all the phone screens but liked the mail team the most due to its open-source tech stack, highly visible product, and work on a product with very high scale.

I scheduled an onsite and met with the team. There were four interviews: one with an architect, two with software engineers, and one with the hiring manager. One was a design interview, and three were whiteboard coding sessions. I was looking for a place where I could develop my technical skills and career and wanted to be challenged technically. I got a good vibe from them.

The recruiter called me a week later to inform me that the team wanted to extend an offer.

Overall, my experience was positive. There was a certain stigma associated with Yahoo in my circle of friends, being perceived as an old software company, but I got a very good impression from them. The culture seemed great, and the people were passionate. The questions asked were very challenging and on par with other companies (I also interviewed with companies like Facebook, Google, Palantir, and Twitter).

Some questions I received included:

• How would you design Yahoo Groups? Technical deep dive and CAP theorem tradeoffs.
• Concurrency questions.
• Implement an address book where you can access a contact in O(1) time, list contacts in alphabetical order in O(n) time, and get prefix results as you type a search query.
• Web development questions.
• OS questions.

Write an interface to a file system.