A recruiter reached out to me by email. I didn't actually know this company at first, but later I found out it does AI inference and is a competitor of Fireworks. They're already at Series F with a $13B valuation. Supposedly their headcount is going to grow 50% this year.
I interviewed for the General SWE position. The process was as follows:
- Recruiter call
- HM call (background + behavioral)
- Technical screen (coding)
- VO, 4 rounds
Here are the technical questions I got.
Screen coding: the first part was to implement a random number generator, which needed XOR bit operations. The second part was to use that RNG to encrypt and decrypt a tree-structured document. My solution was to serialize the document first and then encrypt it, then decrypt and deserialize.
VO coding: implement a simplified S-exp parser. It had to be sequential parsing, done in a single pass, and I couldn't use split(). There were three parts. The first was very easy, implement parsing an atom. The second was parsing expressions with parentheses, where the interviewer cared mostly about error handling, like how to stop parsing when you hit an invalid character. I spent too much time on edge cases in the second part, so I didn't finish the third part, recursive parsing. I think I probably failed this round.
VO design: design an observability logging system. It needed to emit logs and also query them.
The VO also had one project deep dive round and one stakeholder behavioral round, both pretty standard. Overall the company feels very young, and the HM and most of the interviewers were all young people. About two weeks later I got the rejection email.
There aren't many interview reports for this company on the forum yet. The interview wasn't easy, thanks for reading!
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