A recruiter reached out. I looked up the company online and felt the culture seemed okay, so I went ahead and interviewed.
The recruiter call was just casual chatting, and we quickly landed on an interview time. I hadn't grinded LeetCode in a long time so I was a little worried, so I scheduled the phone screen slot for two weeks out and started grinding through interview experience posts. In the end I didn't use a single one of those questions.
Two rounds, back-to-back.
The first round was with the hiring manager — just casually chatting about my projects, not a particularly formal behavioral round.
For the second round, the message the recruiter sent said it would be trivia plus coding, but the engineer interviewing me said right away that we didn't need to do a coding problem, so it turned into trivia followed by behavioral.
The behavioral and trivia questions were pretty much the same as what's covered in a similar interview experience post I'd read beforehand.
A few questions I still remember (all deep dives on topics from that post):
- sync vs async
- load balancer, different types of routing policies
- cache
- Golang channel vs memory sharing
- SQL vs NoSQL
- how to design a system with idempotency support
Overall I felt the engineer's technical level wasn't as strong as at the mid-size company I'm currently at, but everyone I talked to seemed nice and it was pretty relaxed. That said, they just went public, so over the next year or two there could be changes in culture, org structure, and strategy.
The day after the interview, the recruiter said there were a lot of candidates in the pipeline who were a better fit, so they weren't moving forward with me.
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