I applied online. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Otter.ai (Mountain View, CA) in Sep 2025
Interview
Received an OA done through Karat. Interviewer asked leetcode mediums, both of which included matricies and implementation as the core challenges. Completed 2 of them, ran out of time, didn't hear back.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Tell us about your past experience, tell us about yourself, LC mediums with matricies and implementation
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Otter.ai
Interview
Recruiter reached out to me. Standard code screen and then an onsite in Mountain view. Process took at least a few weeks. Hiring manager seemed brilliant. Very pleasant interaction with the recruiter. Actually gave constructive feedback on the interviews and actually seemed to care about my career.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
It was a while ago, so I don't remember the coding interview, but it was a standard medium difficulty problem that you would find on Leetcode.
I went through the interview process around a year ago. The process started with a call with the recruiter who was very friendly. After that, there was a 45 minute coding interview with an engineer. The question was a leetcode medium-hard related to finding the shortest path between 2 islands within a grid. I came up with a solution using BFS that works, but the interviewer wanted me to optimize which was fine by me.
The interview went pretty well up until I started coding the optimized solution when I kid you not, I recognized the sounds of chess in the background. I glanced at the video call and noticed the engineer wasn't paying attention at all and was playing chess while I was walking through my code.
Insanely disrespectful, I was so frustrated when that happened. How long is your attention span that you can't sit for a 45 minute interview, which to be honest, is not enough for the difficulty of their interview question unless you have seen the exact problem before.
This has to be the worst interview experience I have ever had. I hope this doesn't represent the company's culture.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Shortest path between 2 islands in a grid that has only 2 islands.