They clearly spent a lot of effort into their interview process but it felt incredibly impractical. They use CodeSignal for their coding interviews and want to make it a more pleasant experience for their interviewees. So their solution was to invest heavily into setting up scaffolding and test cases in advance. One coding interview was so incredibly complicated I'm surprised that their candidates can actually finish it in 50 minutes. It was a full-blown project with multiple files with many additional hidden files that are imported so you aren't supposed to touch them or worry about them. Trying to click between multiple files and debug and run code in a CodeSignal environment was an insane overload on my brain and I had to swap between 4 files in a CodeSignal. Using an online code editor to do IDE work is pretty impractical. On top of that, they had a database mocked in one of the many CodeSignal files -- because obviously you can't connect to an actual real database in the interview sandbox. So you had to pretend it's a working database and make modifications to it while ignoring most considerations that you would have for working with one. Thank you for spending the time to set up this project for candidates to make it seem realistic, but holy moly who actually completes these in 45-50 minutes? They over-invested into fitting a square peg into a round hole (making CodeSignal "more practical") and the application itself is not simple. Both of these points put a HUGE amount of cognitive burden on the candidate. Not only that, but my interviewer struggled a bit to explain what exactly they wanted me to do in this project.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Complex problem in CodeSignal. Get very familiar with the editor because you'll have to work with multiple files, debug, and whatnot in it.
I applied online. I interviewed at Dropbox in Apr 2026
Interview
take home OA, two technical rounds, system design and wrap up call with hiring manager. Very transparent, recruiter is there for you describing process in detail, they really want you to get hired
I did OA and phone screen. During the phone screen, the HR did not ask too much questions about myself and mainly spent time talking about next steps. And then ghost me from there. This is not a good interview experience and a timely feedback or reject would be much better.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Describe yourself and what is your goal in your new job
Initial coding exam with extreme difficulty, leetcode type exam with a time limit. After that you progress to an onsite interview with system design questions. The initial coding exam has about 3 multistep questions.