Benchling Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

The interview process kicked off with a technical screen where I had to implement a traffic light timer, with a focus on writing clean code rather than optimizing for speed. The second round involved debugging some existing code and adding a new feature to manage specific edge cases. I felt the interviewer for the second round was quite sharp, though not particularly supportive during the session. There was also a feeling that the candidate had already been selected before the interview even began.

The interview process was pretty standard for a software engineering role. It included some general programming questions, data design, and systems architecture questions. The company was very responsive and positive until the reference check stage, after which I was ghosted when I asked for more context. This was shocking given their previous positive interactions, but the treatment during the rejection was very unprofessional.

I interviewed with Benchling. The first step was a recruiter call, then a 1-hour LeetCode-style coding problem. I didn't get the job, but I thought the interviewer and recruiting team were great. The interviewer was really engaged. I asked about my weaknesses, and they gave me some good advice. I was able to work through the solution, but I ran out of time to optimize it further or discuss the time/space complexities. Overall, I had a really good experience with them. The problem was about cache eviction, which involved hash maps and queues and had some tricky parts and edge cases.