The interview was pretty standard, first I had my first chat about Clear Street with their recruiter; this first conversation gave me pretty good insights into what Clear Street was looking for. The next conversation was with the hiring manager, this was a technical interview discussing architectural concepts behind some of the technology that Clear Street uses and I have experience with, also general distributed systems concepts; it was more of a conversation than anything. This lead to the on site (virtual on site due to COVID), it was a series of interviews around a few topics:
- Distributed Systems (1hr): questions around distributed systems concepts
- Computer Science Concepts / Coding interview (1hr): this was a LeetCode type of question, it wasn't particularly hard just be ready to answer algorithm complexity
- Problem Solving / Algorithms (1hr): this included some basic statistics problems which I wasn't particularly prepared for, but just make sure you have some basic stats refresher.
Overall if you have distributed systems experience you should do pretty well in this type of interview, the questions regarding concepts of CS/Mathematics/etc aren't anything out of the ordinary.
Finally I had a take home project that included some amount of design questions, the project took some effort but it ultimately helped me have better understand what Clear Street was working on (which hadn't been super clear to me until this point). I'm more comfortable in Java, so I built it in Java; Clear Street is mostly a Go shop though.