I applied online. The process took 8 weeks. I interviewed at Instabase
Accepted offer
Positive experience
Difficult interview
Application
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Instabase (San Francisco, CA)
Interview
The interview process considered of 3 telephonic interviews followed by a full day of onsite. Every single interviewer was 1. Intelligent 2. Humble and 3. Precise. From my interview experience, their questions were pretty similar to Google (objectively speaking, some rounds were harder). They are an excellent team with great investors and more importantly a challenging but possible (and useful) vision.
Expect LC medium and hard. Be sure you can explain thought process behind your solutions really well.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Following topics were covered in the interview questions:
1. Past projects and software architecture choices in them.
2. Data structures and algorithms
3. Object Oriented programming
4. System Design and database management systems.
You will be tested on all skills. Interviewers seemed to be more interested in thought process rather than optimal solution (although that was also important).
Variety of coding qs, behavioral, and system design interviews, online assessment and karat interview at beginning, recruiter calls through out (helpful for prep), can avoid long consecutive hours of interviews, spread out
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
When was a time when something ended up more poorly than you hoped?
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Instabase in Oct 2020
Interview
At first it was a short 20min recruiter call. Then they set me up for a technical phone screen with an engineer. The problem was a typical data structure / algo question, something you'd expect. I asked some cool questions and got to know more about the company.
Then I was moved to the onsite, which was 5 hours. Honestly, it was one of the best onsites I've had. The questions asked were creative & really relevant to the product, and they were actually interesting to solve. They weren't too challenging, and definitely weren't like those typical 'reverse a linked list' cliché interview questions.
They also asked some ML and system design questions, it was quite enjoyable - I felt like I was working through the problem with the engineer (interviewer). It was definitely collaborative (instead of 'interrogative'), which was awesome.
