BlackLine Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

I applied online and got a call from HR the very next day. The HR team was super helpful in setting up the interview. The first round was with a manager. He spent an hour asking a lot of questions about the sprint process at my current company and took notes. I've been in over 15 interviews, and while most interviewers, especially managers or VPs, are usually really chill, this guy was incredibly annoying. After I answered all his questions, I tried asking him a few, but he shut me down, saying it wasn't about me asking him questions. Thankfully, I didn't get the job, and I'm thankful I don't have to work under him!

I was contacted by a recruiter on LinkedIn for a staff software engineer role. First, there was a one-hour recruiter phone screen about my background. Then, I had a one-hour interview with a developer and a technical manager. The next step was a 4-hour interview with 4 people: a senior software engineer, a database engineer, a principal engineer, and a director. I took a day off for this. On the interview day, I had 2 interviews initially with the senior software engineer and the db engineer. While waiting for the 3rd interview, they canceled the rest because of a production issue and wanted to reschedule. I agreed and scheduled another 2 hours. On the rescheduled interview day, during one of the interviews, no one showed up for 15 minutes. I texted HR and the interviewer finally showed up, clearly upset, and said I was "only" 15 minutes late. I knew it wouldn't go well but finished the interview. I didn't get an offer.

The initial interview involves a round of fundamental computer science and tech questions. It's a traditional interview approach that's fairly simple if you've reviewed some computer books or common software interview questions beforehand. This style doesn't really show what a candidate is truly like, though, because I've known many engineers who can pass these tests but are actually bad at their jobs. There were also several concerning signs, so be sure to ask specific questions about their culture and tech stack to confirm it's a good match.