A recruiter reached out on LinkedIn saying my background was a good fit, and after an HR call I moved into the interview process.
The Phone Screen was an Easy coding question with a follow-up — string matching.
After passing the Phone Screen, I had a 30-minute informal chat with the Hiring Manager, mostly about the team's business and my own work experience. After that, HR reached out to schedule the Loop Interview. The Loop was originally scheduled as two 1-hour coding rounds, one 75-minute System Design + Domain Knowledge round, and one 45-minute Hiring Manager round. Then, a week before the Loop, HR notified me that it had changed to: one coding round, one SD round, one HM round, plus a separate 1-hour Domain Knowledge round ... I couldn't find a similar interview format when I searched around.
HM round: a quick round of behavioral questions, about six or seven of them.
SD: design a Notification System. I felt I hadn't prepared for this one and had to think it through on the spot.
Coding: the classic Dash Mart question, solved with BFS. I ran out of time on the follow-up question and just wrote out a rough approach.
Domain Knowledge: a deep dive into one of my projects, where I had to draw a design/architecture diagram just like in the SD round, followed by a lot of questions that went beyond my resume. Since my day-to-day work hadn't touched that area, I could only answer what I actually knew.
I interviewed the first three rounds on Friday and the last round (Domain Knowledge) on Monday afternoon, then got the rejection email Tuesday afternoon. The whole process was very efficient and the interview experience was pretty good overall, but in the end I got rejected. I later found out that the role HR had matched me to required at least 5 years of experience, while I only have three years. I thought I was interviewing for E4, and I'm not sure whether they actually evaluated me against E4 or E5 standards. I've heard DoorDash's bar is pretty high — moving on.
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