DoorDash Software Engineer Interview Experience — Four Onsite Rounds, Rejected Three Days Later

The phone screen was two months ago. The question then was [LeetCode] Koko Eating Bananas.

I dragged it out for two months before I finally did the onsite. Four rounds.

Round 1 was system design. The question was a three-day donation system. This round was 75 minutes long, but the interviewer and I ended up deep-diving into my project until the 45-minute mark before he even got into the design part, so there were only 30 minutes left. The pace was really rushed and we just barely got through it.

Round 2 was code craft. It was a commonly-asked question — the Dasher Pay one. Pay attention to some of the error handling on the data. At the end there was a follow-up about a peak-hour question, on how to raise the pay rate.

Round 3 was bug-hunting — the classic "request round-robin forwarding" bug. After more than 25 minutes fixing that, we moved into round two of the same session, where he had me write consistent hashing. Ugh, I'd read the theory before but actually writing it out live was still hard. The interviewer also made me run the tests, which was rough. In the end it was mostly correct, but I didn't get to run all the tests.

Round 4, 45 minutes, was the interviewer asking some classic behavioral questions. Nothing surprising, just got through it.

Three days later I got the rejection. Looking at how bad DoorDash's reputation is on the forum, I hadn't prepared seriously for it anyway — just moving on.