I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Samsara in Apr 2021
Interview
Recruiter reached out to me after I got a referral from someone. Chatted about the company, my background, and the positions Samsara was looking to fill.
Four days later I had a phone screen interview with one of their engineers on CoderPad. The interview was nothing spectacular, mostly just spent time working on the question given. No questions were asked about my experience. They did ask a fairly lengthy question about String parsing that could not have been done in the given 30 min. They do tell you that they do not expect you to code the whole thing within that time frame, but I was still repeatedly asked to run my code to go through some tests--so coding in smaller, testable chunks seemed to be the best way to approach this question rather than discussing the approach as a whole.
Overall it was fine--my interviewer was nice, gave some feedback but was mostly quiet.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a string written in markdown, output a string with the HTML tags replacing the markdown formatting.
First a HR call - goes into project details, what you're looking for, etc
Got connected to a Hiring Manager for a project deep dive + TPS round within the hour. TPS question not too difficult - not leetcode.
live coding session, create a md to html translator. It was all live with unique requirements making it more difficult than I expected using regex. The interviewer was not personable and it was a very uncomfortable experience
I made it to the technical screen and didn't proceed further. Recruiter call was the usual experience dive, comp discussion, and why you are looking for a job. The technical screen was a string parsing question.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Technical: String parsing. Be comfortable with regex
