SendGrid Interview Questions in Denver, CO

Application

I applied online. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at SendGrid (Denver, CO).

Interview

Went through the HR screening process and was later scheduled to have a technical interview with one of their senior software engineers. The technical interview went over generic questions about design patterns like "what is polymorphism", etc. and later went on to use a collaborative text editor only to be asked to implement a binary search method. The description of the position listed PHP as the primary language and made no mention of any language were you would ever need to [re-]implement something like this, thus I ended the interview. Forming this same question as a pre-interview exercise would have been much more appropriate. I would never take a position where I had to solve difficult problems that require concentration while having someone breathing down my neck, and for the same reason I would never take a position that screens employees utilizing this setting.

There is an unlimited list of programming concepts that one needs to selectively navigate depending on the requirements of the specific role or craft you want to work in/with. Asking questions that do not apply to that role during an interview is poor form. Test the knowledge and experience relative to the role instead of just trying to test what a candidate doesn't know (you'll pass up on plenty of great programmers). I've worked with plenty of people in the past that were better at reading technical articles and explaining design patterns while not knowing when and when not to apply them, much less being able to get work done in a reasonable time-frame.

Application

I applied through an employee referral. The process took a week. I interviewed at SendGrid (Denver, CO) in February 2019.

Interview

Initial 30 minute phone screen consisting of behavioral questions, technical questions, and inquiries about previous projects.
I passed this phone screen and advanced to the next stage which was a take-home technical challenge. This challenge involved building a simple single page web app in HTML, CSS, and jQuery after fetching data and images from a provided API.

I spent about 8 hours on this technical challenge and showed it to some colleagues to look over before submitting. As far as we all could tell, it worked perfectly, satisfied all the requirements, and contained several features to make it look more like the provided comp (even though these features were not listed as requirements).

The SendGrid recruiter I was working with informed me about a week later that they would not be proceeding with my application, but was friendly and offered to answer any questions I might have. I wrote back asking for some feedback about my submitted tech challenge to learn if I had inadvertently made some mistakes. No response, as is unfortunately typical for many companies. Whether it was due to the companies lack or organization or consideration for candidates who invest time in these challenge, I don't know.

Application

I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at SendGrid (Denver, CO) in December 2016.

Interview

Two parts: a phone screen asking basic experience/skillset related questions. That was followed by an onsite with two rounds. First round a technical interview with 2 engineers on the team involving some data structures/algo questions + role-specific applied technical questions. Second round was with a manager and involved behavioral questions.

Application

I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at SendGrid (Denver, CO).

Interview

They put a very high emphasis on culture and values throughout the process and simply tried to get to know me to better understand if I was a good match. The questions are all basic and nothing out of the ordinary. Expect to talk with up to 5 different members of your potential team - they want the whole team to have a say in the hiring decision. Overall, it was a great experience!

Application

I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at SendGrid (Denver, CO) in June 2014.

Interview

Lengthy! Phone interview (x2), 4-6 in person interviews all in one day, then a 2nd day of in-person interviews with 2-3 more folks, then a final lunch with VP of the department.

Application

I applied online. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at SendGrid (Denver, CO) in June 2013.

Interview

Did a phone interview with HR person and then had a call with hiring manager. Typical interview questions. Nothing unusual. When asked to go onsite, I met with 5 different people, future co-workers and team mates. They are proud of their culture and are very picky of who they would select as part of their team

Application

I applied online. The process took 2+ weeks. I interviewed at SendGrid (Denver, CO) in July 2016.

Interview

applied, 1 phone interview, 1 on-site w/3 recruiters a coordinator and a sr engineering manager.

very nice people, but there is no one manning the store and they're in need of adults that have scaled tech companies before. at one point they actually bragged about hiring an engineer from my company that was managed out - strange

they are very nice, if you love email and looking to work next to passionate people it seems like a great place

Application

I applied through an employee referral. The process took a week. I interviewed at SendGrid (Denver, CO) in February 2017.

Interview

First a 30 minute phone call with SendGrid recruiter then a 30 minute phone call with hiring manager within a couple of days.
I'm disappointed in SendGrid. They boast that they hire a culture of 4Hs: Happy, Humble, Hungry and Honest and pride themselves on their transparency. Those were the qualities that I admired about them.
After my second interview, I received a standard rejection email that said they would be happy to discuss details as to why they weren't moving forward. A few days later, I was able to schedule a face-to-face with the recruiter to get feedback. I showed up early and waited over an hour before I realized I was stood-up. No communication before, and no more communication after. To me, that doesn't seem honest nor transparent.

Application

I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at SendGrid (Denver, CO) in January 2016.

Interview

Phone screen with HR / Recruiting, Phone screen with manager, screen share coding interview, in person technical interview.

Screen Share coding interview was straightforward and not difficult. Basically, they give you a jUnit suite and some stub code, you have to write the method bodies to make the tests pass.

Group coding exercise was difficult for me. Multithreaded programming question, not necessarily difficult in itself but I'm most comfortable with Java and the machine was not really set up as a Java dev box so that took some time, and on top of that, I don't really mess with low-level Java thread code too much, so I had to spend a lot of time Googling. Was a bit nerve wracking.

Whiteboard architectural talk went OK, I felt like the interview team had pretty much made up their minds already by that point.

Finished with 1:1 interview with a manager, more of the soft skills interview questions. Lots of things that felt like trick questions. Really pays to think carefully about why interviewer is asking these questions.

Eventually rejected saying they wanted a candidate with "more coding experience" which I take to mean, they wanted someone who gives the aura of being able to handle multithreaded code with ease. Fair enough, from talking to them they run a very high volume operation and I'm sure threading / parallelism is a big day to day concern.

Application

I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at SendGrid (Denver, CO) in April 2019.

Interview

After a short exchange with the recruiter, and no exchange with an actual hiring manager or anyone on the team to do an initial screen for fit, was sent a timed online coding test that only tested data structures and algorithms, no coding exercises about any front end development. Was also not given instructions that the test would be on non-front end skills, giving me no change to prepare.

About a week later, the recruiter emailed back saying they did not want to move forward with me, but if I wanted to "review CS fundamentals" I could re-apply in the future. Still can't believe they feel entitled to ask senior developers to sacrifice free time learning and being tested on skills that aren't a part of the job they are applying for.