Steps: - 30min recruiter phone screen - 45min coding screen (practical but with an algorithm design component where it's useful to know your Knuth/CLRS) - 45min system design screen, of the architecture style, where it's useful to be caught up on how distributed systems get built today (both scaling/etc. and different architectures you could pick to meet the same functional requirements) - full day on-site toy project (with 15min recruiter prep call before) - 15m final CEO screen Fairly standard software engineering interview process. On-site itself lets you meet your potential teammates, engineering leaders you'd be working under, and everyone at the company.

Starts off with an HR call, then an online technical assessment. There's a portion where you read a design doc and provide comments and answer questions (as if you were reviewing it). Then a coding portion where you're given a small codebase and asked to implement a few features. Honestly it was kind of cool and interesting. No gotchas or anything, it felt like I was working with existing code to build new features like in a professional setting. Both are timed about 45 minutes each. Next step is a live system design. This was pretty standard stuff, you're not asked to "build Twitter" and it was actually an interesting prompt. Know your stuff and it won't be much of an issue. Be ready to discuss tradeoffs and explain your decisions. The last step is the on-site. The recruiter spent some time trying to prep me, but it didn't really help much. It was an all-day assignment to build some service using AWS. This is where the experience fell apart and why I only marked it neutral. The prompt was kind of bare and you're left to figure everything out yourself. You do have a buddy who gives you help when you need it. You're expected to use your own AWS account and pay for it (reimbursement was never talked about). Not a big deal as it ended up costing about 75 cents, but still not expexted. The assignment ran from 10am to 5pm, after which we spent over an hour presenting and discussing it; I left after 6:30pm. I remember that after the presentation and demo, I was asked a bunch of questions that didn't really relate to the work I did. I really had no idea what they were looking for. They did get back to me quickly at every step (within a few days), so that was good. When they decided not to move forward, the recruiter gave me a call and shared some feedback, which is always appreciated.