The interview process was very lengthy and had 5 steps: - Recruiter Call - Technical Screening w/ Manager - Take-home Project - Take-home Project Review - 5 round Interview Loop Overall, I really enjoyed everyone I worked with during the interview process! My recruiter was very helpful and every engineer I interviewed with was personable and talented. Definitely people I would've enjoyed having as co-workers. Smartcar is great about communicating what each step of the process is and what the expectations are. They're also very prompt about getting back to you with feedback + results of each round. I also enjoyed that each technical round was practical and related to the job you'd be doing. Despite these upsides, I think their interview process is way too long. The take-home project is non-trivial and there's 9 distinct interview rounds (including each step of the interview loop). That's a large time investment, especially if you're already working a full-time job + have a family. Even most tech giants don't have such a long recruitment process, and their compensation/benefits are significantly higher. Ultimately, I had a positive experience and Smartcar seems like a great place to work! However, their interview process needs to be streamlined.

The interview process involved a call with the recruiter, who was friendly and helpful. The next step was a 1 hr call with the hiring manager, followed by a take home project. If you pass that, you go on and do a project review, then a final interview with a couple of folks lasting probably 3 hours. One thing to note. On the take home project I wrote over 1500 lines of code with 2 pages worth of documentation in 3 days and got rejected. Their standards are unrealistic - they expected it to be production ready with no mistakes, full test coverage (both unit and integration), error handling, and with full documentation. I had all of these and they were nitpicky. Most of us have lives, and I would NEVER ask 1 engineer without a code review to write that much code in 3 days and expect it to be nothing more than a prototype, let alone production-ready. They didn't even have the decency to listen to my reasoning as to why I made certain decisions during development, and what I decided to focus my limited time on.