I was contacted by a sourcer via LinkedIn, scheduled an intro call with a third-party recruiter via Zoom. This was an introductory call, mostly high-level about the business & position, some of my background and what I'm looking for.
From there, I had a Zoom interview with the CTO. This dug deeper into the backstory of Daylight and the tech. More background, still fairly informal / relaxed.
Next step was a 1 hour technical interview through Karat. This is fairly standard, brief background, some general knowledge / trivia type questions, and a programming problem -- think string manipulation, array processing, etc.
After this was a virtual onsite, 5 interviews totaling 3 hours of interview time. My schedule was split with some odd breaks, so I had to block out an extra hour. I was told ahead of time that there would be some chats with members of the team, some technical topics and general problem solving approach but no actual coding.
Interview 1 - Two interviewers; chat about general engineering practices and processes. They asked some questions about Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and dug into code reviews, how I think about quality code.
Interview 2 - One interviewer, chat about culture and work style. Pretty informal but very informative, lots of opportunity for questions about life and work at Daylight.
Interview 3 - Two interviewers, problem solving. This is where things got weird. It started with asking if there was an interesting language I've wanted to learn but haven't yet, so I talked a bit about Elm. They then asked me to imagine we had a backend system written in Elm, and we wanted to port it over to Rails. At the same time, we wanted to switch Banking-As-A-Service providers. I was asked how I would accomplish this.
It was really difficult to tell what they were looking for and what the significance of the language was in the situation. They asked for an estimate of the length of time it would take, and again it was unclear what they wanted. After pulling an estimate out, they asked me how big my team was and how we were planning on delivering the project in time.
From there, they added that transferring funds between BAAS providers would take three days -- how would we handle that? How do customers retain access to their funds and how do we handle the change of account number when switching providers? How do we communicate this to our users?
This was for an interview for a backend engineer position, and these questions felt much more suited to someone applying for a Principal or Director level position.
I had two more informal interviews after this, one with the COO & another with the CTO. I was told that I should hear back from someone on the team the next week. I received an impersonal auto-rejection from their candidate management system the next morning.
