Secret Sauce Partners Interview Questions

The interview process was or would've been 5 rounds of video meetings wit hdifferent team leaders and the ceo. They left me with no feedback after the 4th meeting, even after asking about some update on the next round or in general in an e-mail. They just disappeared.

2-3 rounds, involving managers, team leader or colleague you'll work close together with, and the owner of the company. General get to know you, professional experience and some revealing questions about your overall personality and work ethic.

The first part of the process was an interview with algorithms and machine learning related questions. Second part was an interview with higher management about my goals and why I want to work for the company. The third part was an assignment on a machine learning problem.

The process consisted of a homework assignment and two face to face interviews. The home assignment included easy-medium level tasks related to a sample database. The first interview was about 1.5 hours long and focused on statistics and analytical skills, while the second took more than 2.5 hours, focusing on personality and strategy. The home assignment and the interviews were rather positive experiences: questions and tasks were quite interesting and communication was smooth. However, following all these steps, no feedback was sent. I followed up the process after two months and received refusal. Considering the time consuming (though meaningful) process, I evaluate the lack of feedback as a strongly negative point.

First of all, I had a very pleasant experience and would recommend Secret Sauce Partners to anyone looking for a great team with interesting products and technologies and a culture of transparency. The process took 1.5 months, and consisted of a fairly easy online HackerRank test (3 tasks in 60 minutes, 2 coding/algorithmic exercises and an essay), a review/discussion through mailing on implementation details. At this point, I was signed an NDA. An in-person technical interview followed with two developers, a more personal interview with the team manager and two sessions with the CEO through Skype. There was an assessment day as well. The technical interview was more of the "how you see.../what do you think about..." type and covered certain aspects of JVM, multithreading, testing, OOP and HTTP. The team manager interview was more about culture fit and team-fit aspects with HR-like questions on strengths and improvable skills, etc. The interview with the CEO was split into two parts due to limited availability, first one being a more personal one on my personality, goals, views, and the second one was on startups generally. There was also an assessment day where I had to implement the back end of a web service in a chosen language/framework. This day was finished with a 1-on-1 assessment and was followed by a detailed code review from the other technical interviewer. The whole process was well-coordinated, all participants were very responsive throughout the selection.

Online test using HackerRank. 3 personal meetings. One technical, one with a manager and one with the founder. After all this a trial day in the office. It started really slowly, but at the end it went very fast. I got to meet most of the company, so I could get a good picture of them.

There was a Hacker Rank task followed by a technical on-site interview. After that there were two more interviews with the VP of Engineering and the CEO which had the goal of getting to know each other well. The process concluded with a trial day.

I went through the same interview process other reviewers have already described: a Hackerrank coding challenge, an onsite technical interview, two soft skills interviews (where we also talked about the company structure, the technology used, development methods, working hours, etc.) and a small coding project. The best part of the process was a session with the founder and CEO, a highly experienced tech entrepreneur, where he explained his insights and vision about the company and tech startups in general. I learnt a great deal about the history and the mechanics of the industry. I also very much enjoyed the technical interview, where I had to answer questions about the concepts in data processing technologies (e.g. ETL vs. Kafka, columnar storages, compression methods). The coding project was taken pretty seriously, they did a very thorough code review, and my impression is that the effort I put in and the quality of code played a significant role in their final decision. Generally speaking, the whole interview process was organized professionally. The six rounds took two months to complete.

Hackerrank test then through tech and personality interviews and finally a trial day. There was plenty of time to get a feel of how the company operates and the CEO even shared their plans that I really appreciated.