The first round was with a tech lead, and it was the only round with a good experience. It wasn't a traditional behavioral round — it was pretty relaxed, just getting a feel for work style and company culture.
Right after the tech lead round I was immediately moved forward, and then HR vanished for a week. I emailed the tech lead to ask what was going on, and that's how I found out the original HR had left the company. Once a new HR person was assigned, I was told there would be 3 technical interviews. The instructions just said "coding interview," but in practice the actual format was completely random, and HR wouldn't even tell me what type of interview each one would be. After that, I basically gave up trying to guess and just went in unprepared for whatever came.
The first of the three turned out to be a system design round — I had assumed it would be coding. The interviewer asked if I wanted to reschedule, but I gritted my teeth and pushed through anyway. Sure enough, when I followed up with HR afterward, she still wouldn't tell me what type of interview was coming next. The system design prompt was:
We want to build a backend system that satisfies a frontend use case at Opendoor. The use case is that we want to give our customers the ability to search for homes on a map. Imagine Google maps or similar websites, as a user you are presented with a map view where you can select an area to search within – the search area is an arbitrary box that the user selects and is the only required input. The user can then optionally select additional fields like the price range, listing status, and various home characteristics.
Search filters:
- Search area (e.g. rectangle) - REQUIRED
- Price range
- Listing status (e.g. active, sold)
- Home characteristics
- Sq ft
- Num bedrooms
- ~50 pre-computed characteristics
The second round was a coding interview — identical to a problem that's already been posted elsewhere on this forum.
For the third round, the second-round interviewer had told me there would be a behavioral round, and the interviewer was a VP who'd only been at the company for two weeks — but it turned out to be a coding interview instead. It was a web crawler question. The interviewer basically gave no hints about which API to use — I had to Google requests.get() and a parsing library on the spot. He wouldn't answer clarifying questions or tell me what edge cases to handle, just kept saying "look at the example, do it however you think it should be done." This round was a genuinely bad experience.
By the time I'd finally clarified what I was supposed to do, 37 minutes had already gone by. The code itself was actually simple — most of the time went into Googling which library to use — and I ended up writing it quickly at the end.
The tech lead and the two engineers were all pretty good. The HR and VP interview experiences were absolutely terrible.
Discussion
Loading comments…