Axon Software Engineer Interview Experience — System Design Stumble and a Grueling Behavioral Round

SD: This was about fulfillment center truck routing and container/inventory. I didn't perform well in this round — I started off saying too much fluff about FR/NFR, and the interviewer caught it and challenged me on it, which put me under time pressure. I wasn't very familiar with this problem, since I've never worked on anything fulfillment-related. Looking back, I realized it was basically a simplified Uber, and there were a lot of deep dives I actually did know. But once the interview rhythm goes off, it's hard to turn things around in such a short time. Overall this round didn't go great — if I were the interviewer, I probably wouldn't have passed myself.

Coding: A BFS variant — groups nested with users nested with devices, and in the end you're asked which devices can be accessed. It's really just a BFS. This round was a bit rocky, but the interviewer was nice and gave me an extra 5 minutes to finish writing and testing.

Behavioral, 2 rounds: one in person — this one was basically a pressure interview. The director felt very far removed from anything technical — for everything I said I had to give context: what it is, what it's for, why it's used, what the challenges were, what exactly my scope was, when I got promoted, what specifically I did to get promoted, why the promotion happened so fast that it seemed unreasonable to him. Very confrontational — I got interrupted mid-sentence three times, to the point where at the start I couldn't even remember what the question was anymore.

Second round, virtual onsite: having learned my lesson from the previous round, I felt like I did pretty well this time and spoke in a more organized way.

PS: They make you go onsite for one round in person. Their front door looks like a bank vault door, but inside it's really just one floor of offices — not sure why they need that much access control.