Me postulé en línea. El proceso tomó 4 semanas. Acudí a una entrevista en Upstart (San Mateo, CA) en may 2020
Entrevista
Got phone screen by an HM who was professional and friendly. Was asked some CS and DB fundamentals followed by a coding exercise. He also explained well on the role's responsibility so after the call I had a pretty good picture. Then there was a full day virtual onsite (due to covid), which was typical SWE onsite covering coding, design, behavior, etc. Everyone I talked to was nice and enthusiastic about their job. After passing the onsite, I was asked to talk to the SVP and I got an offer a couple of days after. Because I had other interviews lined up, they had been patiently waiting for two weeks, and the recruiter had been very supportive and helpful along the way. I had opportunities to talk to the HM and other leaderships during that time to help me make decisions.
Unfortunately, I decided to accept another offer which was more aligned with my current interest, but from the interview process, I can tell the company has a good work culture and cares about its employees a lot. If this is important to you, I would highly recommend it.
Me postulé a través de un reclutador. Acudí a una entrevista en Upstart (Seattle, WA) en ene 2026
Entrevista
Initial: phone interview about resume and experience(alignment).
second: CodeSignal coding challenge. The questions are on the easy side but the time allocated is very tinny. They want you to come up with a perfect answer within a short period of time.
Preguntas de entrevista [1]
Pregunta 1
1. Sorting anagrams into a bucket( a LeetCode problem).
2. given an encoded string, return decoded string
Me postulé en línea. Acudí a una entrevista en Upstart
Entrevista
Call with recruiter who is very friendly.
Second call with the hiring manager which is 1 hour split in half to talk your projects and do a coding question. Went way over time but we got along great.
Third call was another hour long interview for 2 coding questions. 1 was a leetcode medium and the other was probably a leetcode hard. Definitely not enough time to solve both and the interviewer was acting like the hour was enough time for both questions and a 10 min Q&A. The second question was unclear and the interviewer was not even aware of the scope he was asking.
Me postulé a través de una recomendación de un empleado. El proceso tomó 2 semanas. Acudí a una entrevista en Upstart
Entrevista
The first step was a phone screen with a recruiter, just standard behavioral and “why do you want to work here?” questions. The next step was a behavioral and technical interview with a senior engineer.
The interviewer was pretty friendly overall but clearly did not like some of my answers (I work at a smaller company and we don’t necessarily follow all the best practices, though I described what best practices are. Lesson learned about being honest).
The recruiter had told me the LeetCode problem would be medium, but it seemed closer to easy. I went over time a bit (though we got started late), and I had to look up some syntax I don’t use regularly. The stated purpose of the exercise was to “see how I think,” but we all know that it looks better if you just solve it without looking much of anything up, and I’m sure others solved the problem more quickly. I got a rejection email the following week with no specific feedback.
The next step would have been a 5-hour virtual onsite, which I was kind of dreading anyway, especially given that I was being moved forward by other companies with equally rigorous but less time-intensive interviews. Some of what the interviewer told me about the division also gave me pause. Again, the interviewer was quite nice. While I think watching someone solve a LeetCode problem yields information that’s about as useful as a die roll and in fact tends to select for undesirable traits, it would not have been a good fit, and I appreciate that the interviewer was upfront about the company’s successes and challenges.