Temu Senior Software Engineer Interview Experience — A Two-and-a-Half-Hour Second Round

The difficulty shot up in this second round, though that was mainly because my technical skills were weak. I felt like I'd failed. I saw a report from someone who also had a second round in July, probably with the same interviewer: a strong manager vibe, and basically the same behavioral questions. The embarrassing part is that I only read that report in full after my interview.

Anyways.

This round again started with the interviewer briefly introducing himself, saying his name and team, then asking me to introduce myself. After that, we discussed my resume. That discussion basically had two parts.

Part 1: Details of my background. Where I did my undergraduate and graduate degrees, my previous company, my current company, and my level.

Part 2: He didn't ask about the projects on my resume. He went straight to what my team does, what services we have, our technology stack, our upstream and downstream teams or services, and exactly what our team is responsible for within the organization. I was already answering poorly here. I don't usually get asked this way, and my explanation wasn't particularly polished. The main problem is that what our whole organization does involves a lot of domain knowledge, and I still can't explain our team's work clearly without confusing people. In the first round, for example, I talked with the interviewer for 40 minutes without getting to a single project on my resume. I spent all of it explaining the domain knowledge. So this time, I thought I shouldn't go into too much context, or there wouldn't be time for my projects. But this interviewer was curious and conscientious: whenever something didn't make sense to him, he'd interrupt and ask me to explain. I also work in e-commerce, but the level at which our companies divide up the work seems different, so we often ended up not understanding each other. For example, he'd ask, "Since your team handles this part of e-commerce, where do you store this data?" But our organization is so big that storage isn't even within our organization. He couldn't understand why that data store belonged to another team.

We talked for about 45–50 minutes, then went straight to a coding problem. I froze when I saw it. I'd seen the problem before but hadn't done it—really regretting not working harder—but then I realized this was an extension, not exactly the original. It was 424, a sliding-window problem. The change was to return how many longest substrings there are, rather than the length of the longest substring. At first I had no idea what to do and didn't think of sliding windows at all. I stumbled around and got nowhere, until the interviewer volunteered that I could use a sliding window. Then I started to get an idea. We discussed several cases to watch for and how to make sure the algorithm was correct, then I started writing. Once I had the idea, it was fairly easy to write. When I finished, he asked me to look for bugs. I looked for two minutes and couldn't find any. Then he pointed to a particular line and said there was a bug there. I looked for another two minutes and still couldn't see one. There actually wasn't a bug. Maybe the way I'd written it wasn't the answer he'd expected, so he didn't understand it at first. After I explained it, he understood.

Then there was another question. This one wasn't LeetCode; it was pure Java fundamentals. But I hadn't really written code in almost two years, and I'd never particularly liked Java anyway, so I basically got the whole thing wrong. I won't give the exact question. Broadly, it involved classes, objects, static variables, and constructors. For example, a class defines several variables, some static and some not, changes their values in the constructor, then prints them in main. What exactly are their values?

By the time that question was done, the interview had been going for almost two hours. He still had more questions, similar to behavioral questions. These included, but weren't limited to: How has your performance been over the past two years? How does your manager see or evaluate you? Have you considered promotion? Of course I have. Why haven't you been promoted? What are your strengths and weaknesses? As a job seeker, what do you think of Temu? What are you looking for in your next job? Most of these felt pretty pointed. I hadn't prepared much for behavioral questions, but I don't think I'd have answered them well even if I had, because it feels like American companies don't usually ask questions this way. Of course, maybe this was a stress interview, or just this interviewer's style. After those questions, it was my turn to ask him things, which I did for about 15 minutes.

When the interview finally ended, I checked the time: two and a half hours. I was pretty cooked. This round was honestly a blow. I felt underprepared, still taking things lightly in this job market, not practicing coding seriously, and having no approach when I met an unfamiliar problem. I hadn't even worked out how to explain the basics of my team and my own work in simple terms that an interviewer could quickly understand. My Java fundamentals were a complete mess; I just couldn't answer. I'd been aiming too high without the skills to back it up, thinking that interviewing at senior/staff level meant I didn't need to worry so much about technical ability. In reality, I couldn't answer the technical questions, and I didn't answer the nontechnical ones well either. I didn't help him understand my answers; I just got further off track. My explanation wasn't polished, and I didn't have the commanding presence of a senior/staff engineer. The interviewer definitely had that presence. Anyways, if you're weak, practice more.