I applied through a recruiter and had an interview scheduled within a week with the CTO, VP of Engineering, and a Senior Engineer. The process was a single 90 minute session split into three parts.
•Part 1: Introductions and a discussion of my background, including questions about my experience working in a start-up environment as it scaled.
•Part 2: A live coding exercise based on a verbally described scenario.
•Part 3: A short conversation about a system design problem, based on a slide deck I submitted beforehand.
Overall, the experience was positive. The interviewers were friendly, engaged, and open to discussion and a short break between each stage was offered however I chose to continue. I did struggle with the live coding portion because I haven’t been writing code daily for a few years, but the team encouraged conversation throughout and I never felt pressured or judged.
I also want to mention something that may help others: I have auditory processing issues related to autism spectrum disorder and rely heavily on lip reading. During the live coding section, I was screen sharing, so I couldn’t see the interviewers’ faces and had to rely solely on the audio description of the problem. That definitely affected my performance, and I hadn’t made the recruiter aware of this beforehand. If you have similar needs, it may be worth flagging them early so the team can accommodate you.
