Caribou Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

The interview involved building a fairly simple dynamic page widget. There were a few mistakes in their proposed solutions. The interviewer didn't know that JavaScript arrays are sparse and was looking for a complicated, inefficient way to avoid using too much contiguous memory. They also wrongly claimed that iterating over a 2D array (which wasn't necessarily square) takes O(n^2) time instead of the correct O(m*n). Aside from those points, it was pretty typical. The people were nice, and I appreciated their focus on DEI.

An external recruiter (Creative Alignments) contacted me. We had an hour-long phone call, and she sent me over for a mid-level role. I have about 4 years of experience and accepted. After two weeks of no word, I followed up twice. She said she'd talked to engineering managers and I'd hear from them soon. An internal recruiter then messaged me with a link to schedule a 15-minute chat. I picked a time and confirmed. The internal recruiter called 45 minutes late, leaving a voicemail saying they changed the role requirements to need 7-10 years of experience and have no openings for me. They got my resume, changed the requirements, and wouldn't even talk to me. It was a terrible experience.

The interview process involved 3-5 steps that could be done in any order and didn't block each other, meaning failing one wouldn't stop the others. First, a phone screen with the recruiter. Second, a phone screen with an engineering manager, which was a bit more technical than the recruiter call. Third, a coding challenge. I received the challenge beforehand to set up my environment. Then, I was invited to their Slack as a guest for a video chat. We spent a few minutes confirming I understood the challenge, and then they ended the call, letting me work on it. I could ping them on Slack or start a call if I had questions. They did this to mimic a real workday. The challenge was to build a basic spreadsheet app, involving fixing existing code to pass tests, adding new features, and optionally adding more features or improving data structures. Fourth, a behavioral interview with the dev team. Fifth, a behavioral interview with product.