SIG Software Engineer Interview Experience — Nailed Every Onsite Question, Still Got Rejected

In May, someone from SIG reached out, so I figured I'd give it a shot and set up a recruiter call, which quickly turned into a phone interview.

The phone interview was the classic "movie search" problem — basically you're given a CSV-format list of movies and asked to design a class that supports fast filtering, like pulling movies from year xx to year yy. Also, the constructor's time complexity doesn't matter, only the filtering needs to be fast.

After that they scheduled a virtual onsite, 3 hours, three interviewers each doing one hour. The first one was an algorithm question — given a mapping from company name to ticker, pick out all the tickers contained in a news headline. This kind of question naturally makes you think of a trie.

The second one was an OOD question — design a checkout system that can manage inventory and compute profit in real time.

The third one just went through my resume, and grilled me on the first bullet point for a long time. The interviewer had a heavy accent, so I had to pause for a second to parse each question, but I answered as best I could — when it came to projects I'd actually built, I could just talk naturally about them.

A week later they told me I was rejected. I felt like I'd nailed everything myself — my best guess is that either the first interviewer thought I wrote the trie too quickly and suspected I'd seen that exact question before, or the third interviewer thought my project explanation wasn't good enough. It's also possible my salary ask was too high — I asked for $300k, and I've seen other people on the forum who also asked for around $300k, also felt they solved every onsite question, and still got rejected. In hindsight I should have given a wider range, like $200k-300k, just to test the waters.

The whole process was pretty unpleasant. After the phone screen they set up a recruiter call, but the recruiter never showed up at the scheduled time, and never sent a follow-up email explaining why — they just went ahead and scheduled the onsite directly. Throughout the entire process, none of my emails to the recruiter ever got a real reply from an actual person — it genuinely felt like there was no human on the other end.