Applied through a referral and was contacted by a recruiter for a 20-minute video screening interview. That first round was mainly to learn more about my background, experience, and overall fit for the role.
One major downside throughout the process was the recruiter’s responsiveness. She was very slow in replying and scheduling interviews. For a U.S.-based position, the recruiter was based in Europe, which seemed to create delays and made the process feel careless at times. Scheduling consistently took much longer than expected.
After passing the initial screening, I was scheduled for a technical interview. The first 30 minutes focused on basic JavaScript questions to assess my understanding of the language. The next 30 minutes were centered on an object-oriented design question based on the classic Battleship 10x10 game. The interviewer wanted to evaluate how I designed classes and objects, what patterns I used, and how maintainable and clean my code was.
After clearing that round, I moved on to a final loop of three interviews:
1. DSA Round:
The first 25 minutes were behavioral questions based on two of the company’s leadership values listed on their website. The remaining 25 minutes were spent solving LeetCode 71: Simplify Path.
2. Problem-Solving Round:
Again, the first 25 minutes focused on behavioral questions tied to leadership principles. The last 25 minutes involved a coding problem where the requirements kept evolving. The interviewer started with a basic version of the problem and kept adding new changes and constraints on top of it to test adaptability and problem-solving.
3. Maintainability / OOP Round:
This round followed the same structure: 25 minutes of behavioral questions around leadership values, followed by 25 minutes of an OOP design problem. The task was to design a pizza billing system where users could add toppings and the total cost would be calculated accordingly. The main focus was on writing maintainable, extensible, and modular code.
Overall, I felt I performed very well across the interviews. The interviewers were generally good, and I made an effort to clearly discuss my thought process and approach while coding. In the end, I was rejected with feedback that, in the third loop interview, another candidate wrote code that was considered more maintainable and modular.
However, the recruiting process itself was frustrating. A process involving only five interviews took nearly 1.8 months because of repeated scheduling delays. Multiple times, I was asked to share my availability for a given week, only for the recruiter to reply after that week had already passed and ask for my availability all over again. That repetitive back-and-forth added unnecessary delays and made the process far longer than it should have been.
Overall, the interview experience itself was solid, but the recruiter coordination significantly hurt the candidate experience.
Good Luck!
