BigCommerce Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process
Real candidates share what happened, how many rounds they had,
and how the experience turned out.
Based on 17 interview experiences · FREE TO READ
Candidate interview experiences
First-hand accounts from people who interviewed at BigCommerce.
BigCommerce
Software Engineer
Mid Average Positive experience Accept offer 7 rounds
Interview process
Recruiter call Phone screen Take home Technical screen Onsite Panel Presentation Offer
Interview formats
Coding System Design Behavioral Technical Presentation
The interview process kicked off with a recruiter call and then a chat with the hiring manager. After getting the green light, I had a coding challenge, which for me involved string manipulation in Ruby. Once the technical interviewers were satisfied, I moved on to a code design challenge with engineers, a product interview with a product manager, a culture interview with team members, and a code architecture interview with an architect. All interviews were remote, lasting about 30-60 minutes each. The recruiter was great at keeping me informed about each step and offering tips for the interviews. The whole thing took about a couple of weeks. I actually applied for a Senior position, but they thought I'd be a better fit for the SE2 role. The team and the offer were great, so I happily accepted.
Confirmed questions1 question
- Regarding the design of web services that communicate with each other to fulfill browser requests, consider a scenario with three services. Each service takes 200ms to respond to another. Service 1 requires data from both Service 2 and Service 3 to respond to the client, and the client expects an initial response within 400ms. How would you approach this?
BigCommerce
Software Engineer
Entry Easy Negative experience No offer 3 rounds
Interview process
Recruiter call Take home Technical screen
Interview formats
Technical Coding
I applied online and then had a phone interview where they asked basic HTML questions. After that, the interviewer said she would send an assignment. I got an email to join a GitHub repository. I started the assignment, which had two parts and took me a lot of time to complete. On Monday, the recruiter emailed to apologize for forgetting to send the challenge and provided a link to a different exercise. This made me angry as I had wasted two days on the previous one. I asked the recruiter to consider my completed exercise due to their error. She said she'd send it to the hiring team. After following up two days later, I received a generic rejection email with no specific feedback.
Confirmed questions1 question
- A web development exercise was assigned.
BigCommerce
Software Developer
Senior Difficult Negative experience No offer 3 rounds
Interview process
Recruiter call Technical screen Onsite Background check Offer
Interview formats
Technical Behavioral Coding
I was contacted by a recruiter on LinkedIn for a Senior Software Developer role. The process involved a technical interview, followed by more technical interviews the next week. The engineering director, who couldn't attend in person, conducted a behavioral interview over Skype. The questions were a bit strange, ranging from MySQL index types to Brainfuck coding on a whiteboard, considering the role focuses on PHP/MySQL/Linux. Some questions seemed to come directly from the early chapters of Programming Pearls. Although no offer was made, I was told to reapply in six months. The recruiter was friendly and efficient.
Confirmed questions4 questions
- What are the different types of MySQL indices?
- Could you write a Brainfuck program on the whiteboard?
- How would you find duplicates in an array of integers that exceeds available memory, with progressively stricter memory limits?
BigCommerce Software Engineer Interview Questions
Quoted word for word from BigCommerce interview reports.
“What are the different types of MySQL indices?”
Read reports →“Design a threaded commenting system”
Read reports →“How would you find duplicates in an array of integers that exceeds available memory, with progressively stricter memory limits?”
Read reports →“Then, could you write the asynchronous version of that function?”
Read reports →“Regarding the design of web services that communicate with each other to fulfill browser requests, consider a scenario with three services. Each service takes 200ms to respond to another. Service 1 requires data from both Service 2 and Service 3 to respond to the client, and the client expects an initial response within 400ms. How would you approach this?”
Read report →“And finally, could you write unit tests for these functions from scratch?”
Read report →“Could you write a Brainfuck program on the whiteboard?”
Read report →“Could you explain the SOLID principles?”
Read report →“Can you describe some key concepts from the initial chapters of Programming Pearls?”
Read report →Formats, difficulty and experience
Across all 17 BigCommerce interview reports.