I don't think anyone's posted about this company here — it's probably too small to be on anyone's radar. The pay HR quoted wasn't great either.
Phone Screen 1
Coding: given a width and height, draw a rectangle in ASCII, with different characters for the border and the interior. Second part: draw a series of rectangles on one canvas, and handle overlap plus rectangles that go outside the canvas. I used C++ at the time and didn't fully finish it, but I think it counted as a pass anyway.
Phone Screen 2
System design — design a data aggregation system with multiple sources. It only took 30 minutes and there wasn't much follow-up. After that I had the interviewer talk about his team, the project, the company, and their tech stack — from programming languages to CI/CD, basically covered all of it. Overall felt pretty chill.
VO1
System design — design a SQL query engine.
VO2
Behavioral — an older guy, chatted pretty happily. Besides the usual behavioral questions, this round also had a specific question about how I use AI day to day, how I'd promote AI adoption within a team, and what to watch out for.
VO3
System design — design a "read-once" password sharing system. A user generates a password and gets a URL; whoever they give it to can only read it once. We mostly discussed correctness and a bunch of corner cases — like supporting multiple users, one user possibly wanting to share the same password with different people, how to determine whether a password has already been read, that kind of thing.
VO4
Deep dive into my projects, plus behavioral.
VO5 (Tech VP)
Half behavioral, half me asking him questions. This round also had AI-usage-related questions.
Summary
The process was a bit too long. How the system design interviews go really depends on the interviewer — before the interview, look up their background on a job site, and you can usually guess what they'll ask.
What I learned during the process
The company just announced that everyone is becoming an FDE (forward-deployed engineer) — almost all the engineers got broken up and reorganized into groups of about five with a PM and other stakeholders, working directly with customers. The company's current problem is customer growth and retention, and I'd guess that's why they're doing the all-hands FDE thing. Phone Screen 2, where I said the company felt chill, happened before the all-hands FDE was announced — not sure what it's like now.
Discussion
Loading comments…