I recently finished up a number of interview rounds for a Mobile Developer position at Jet and thought it might be useful to recap my experience for other candidates coming along down the pipeline.
Jet's offices are physically located in downtown Hoboken, on the banks of the Hudson River. The interior space on the 8th floor has a very modern & inspiring feel, with floor to ceiling windows (and a beautiful view of Manhattan on the other side of the river). All of the somewhat impersonal looking desks are currently laid out in pods (i.e. two monitors per desk, 3 - 4 desks per pod?). Lockers for personal effects line the walls. There are a few private spaces (conference rooms for meetings & interviews), phone rooms, for the most part it's all open plan & open space (plus a kitchen -- grab some drinks and snacks between your interviews -- and a nice reception/all-hands-meeting area with a pool table). Despite this, Jet is actually running out of space for their ~300 employees on that floor. Each time I went to the men's room between interview sessions, I noticed a mini-line of one or two guys waiting for a stall to open up. The current plan is to take over some of the 7th floor in the building before the end of the year and possibly the entire 7th floor next year. It'll probably be in the nick of time too: the week I was interviewing, my coordinator said they had 25 candidates coming through. Jet's goal is to get to 100 engineers before the year end.
If you're flying in for your interview from out of town, Jet will likely put you up in the W Hoboken hotel next door to their office building. In my case, I was staying in Manhattan, and I have to admit I was very impressed with the reverse commute. It took about 20 minutes to bus it from the Port Authority terminal to the Jet office, and the return trip on the NJ PATH train was equally as fast. There's also a ferry stop very close by.
For my on-site interview, the coordinator sent me a list of names of people I'd be talking to ahead of time (useful for me to look up their history and background via LinkedIn), ranging from various developers up to a relatively high up person in the company. There appear to be a lot of higher-up bosses at the company, judging from Jet's recruitment videos posted on YouTube.
The phone interview questions were more challenging than the on-site interview questions (I got hit with only a couple milder technical questions and a somewhat tougher one; recapped below), so I'm guessing the on-site interview was meant more as a culture-fit test.
Everyone seemed very friendly and welcoming, except for the most senior person on my interview schedule. He ended up keeping me waiting an extra hour in the interview room as he had to deal with technical issues with the public-facing website (apparently it goes completely dead at least once a month). So when he arrived, he seemed somewhat distracted and not particularly enthusiastic or interested in me or the deep experience I was bringing to the table.
I didn’t get any post interview feedback or notification on how things went until after I prodded the recruiter three or four weeks beyond the interview, and she immediately responded with the “good luck landing a job somewhere else” generic interview rejection e-mail. Not a very professional or organized ending to an otherwise decent interviewing experience. On the flip side, judging by how heavily Jet is trying to binge on new employees, if I were actually working for them, I’d be very worried about the eventual purge if investors lost patience with the company for taking their time to beat Amazon at their game.
Hopefully my experience flunking the Jet.com interview process will help you to prepare to pass your interviewing day. If you find any of the information in this review helpful, please let me know by voting "Yes" on the "Helpful?" question below (this helps to motivate me to be as detailed as possible).