I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Blend in Nov 2021
Application
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Blend in Dec 2018
Interview
I had three phone screens. The first was an initial, and the second and last one were together on video call with two engineers. The interview process was pretty fast overall.
Hackerrank challenge was the first step of the interview process. First call was a phone call with recruiter who was very helpful in laying out the rest of the interview process. Next step was a 60 minute technical interview with a software engineer focused on solving and optimizing the solution for one question. Next was the virtual "in-office" interviews with two developers, one more senior and one a more recent hire. Both provided challenging questions but followed a back-and-forth approach to interviewing that felt cooperative and less stressful.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Imagine items are moving on a conveyor belt. When the conveyor starts, you have no way of knowing how many items will arrive (it could be 1 or it could be 1 million). For quality control purposes, you need to select one item from this conveyor at random SUCH THAT every item has an equal probability of being selected. Devise an algorithm that takes a list of unknown length and selects such a random item without counting the length of the list.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Blend in Apr 2020
Interview
The interview process kicks off with a 60 minute Hackerrank Test consisting of 2 coding questions. One was a leetcode easy and the other was a leetcode medium and were doable in the provided time. This was followed by a 30-minute chat with the recruiter. It was just a normal conversation where they told me about the company and the internship program and I told them about myself. I was asked to email available times for the first technical interview at the end of this chat itself.
The first technical round was of a leetcode medium difficulty and involved recursion. It had a follow-up which involved a discussion about tries, hash-maps and modifying the code I wrote earlier to solve the follow-up. The interviewer was extremely friendly and helpful throughout the interview. He also answered my questions both about the coding problem and about Blend in general with great insight.
I got an email that I would be moving forward to the second and the final technical interview round within 2 days. It consisted of 2 1-hour technical interviews with two engineers. The first interview was again of a leetcode medium difficulty. The question led to a discussion about interpreters, compilers, top down and bottom up parsing, etc but I did not have to code anything more for the follow-up! The second interview started with questions about my past internships and projects. The coding question was of a leetcode hard (though an easier hard) difficulty.
tl;dr
All the interviewers were extremely patient in explaining the problems, brainstorming potential solutions with me, and discussing a wide variety of computer science topics. The entirety of the two hours just felt like a problem solving session with peers.
The questions were mostly of leetcode medium difficulty.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Do you know the difference between an interpreter and compiler?
Still currently in the process. I got a HackerRank assessment through a referral, passed it, and was set up with a phone screen a week later. This involved 5-10 minutes of behavioral questions followed by a technical question. My final round interview is in a few days and consists of 2 back-to-back video simulations.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Generate all possible strings from a string of phone number digits and a mapping of each digit to a set of letters.