I started the interview process on July 8th, 2025 and it ended August 6th, 2025 (they had a week off at one point prior to back to school time). 1st round was a conversation with the head of engineering, 2nd round was technical with two senior software engineers (1 backend and the other frontend), 3rd round was with a senior product manager and the final round was a series of one-on-ones with a senior customer success individual, senior backend engineer, one of the co-founders and then the head of product.
I was declined an offer because I was deemed to "lack technical experience" but from my conversations with the head of engineering I learned that Allstacks had multiple dashboard views throughout the product with a latency of 10+ seconds (not a real-time application btw), the senior backend engineer had been with the company nearly 5 years so I was bit confused about the lack of urgency around query optimization and throughout the interview process I recommended multiple ways to improve their query optimization to make their user experience better. I suspect they hired a referral candidate from someone that was also critical in my interview process which seems unethical but to each their own.
Technical questions:
- Python: show me proper usage of list comprehension, what is a decorator
- SQL: how would you go about optimizing a query, have you used a window function
-DRF: what are the primary components of a DRF project
* there was one question that led to me talking about my experience with rabbitMQ/celery and django but I can't exactly remember what it was.
Tech stack: DRF/Vue, RabbitMQ/Celery, AWS/Azure and a lot of poorly thought out SQL queries.
My advice to other engineers: Throughout life I've learned to avoid people/organizations that are opposed to being honest about themselves and others
