Cboe Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

It started with a video call with the hiring manager, focusing mostly on my past experience. Then, I got a take-home assignment where I had to design a simple order book and test it with some trades. The second part involved four interviews back-to-back: first, discussing my take-home project, second, with the hiring manager again about my previous work, third, again discussing my past experience and a challenge on string encoding, and fourth, yet again about my previous experience. The interview wasn't too tough, and the team seemed pretty chill. They were quick with communication, which was nice, but sadly, no offer came my way.

I got contacted by a recruiter on LinkedIn and the process kicked off with a recruiter phone screen, followed by a Sr. Manager phone screen. Then, I had a take-home coding assessment which took a few hours. After that, there was a technical interview with 8 people from the team, including the Sr. Manager, other Managers, and Sr. or Principal Engineers. The questions covered culture fit, my work history, technical topics, the take-home assessment, and I also did 3 live coding challenges. I really liked the team I met and thought the interviews went okay, but I knew I struggled with the live coding challenges, so I wasn't expecting to proceed. The process was pretty straightforward until this point. Surprisingly, the recruiter reached out and said they wanted to move forward with me as a 'special case', calling me 'lucky'. I repeatedly asked what this 'special case' offer entailed but got vague, evasive answers. Despite the uncertainty, I really liked the technical folks I met and decided to take a chance on another 'special case' round of interviews. This involved two 30-minute calls with the department's VP and the manager who would be my hiring manager. Both meetings felt a bit aimless, like we were all unsure of the purpose. I received an offer, but it was for a regular Software Engineering role, not Senior, which might have been acceptable given my performance on the coding challenges if the recruiter had been upfront from the start. Instead, I got consistently inconsistent and evasive answers throughout, and felt pressured to accept the offer. Ultimately, I decided not to move forward with the company.

So, I had my first interview with the hiring manager. It was planned for 30 minutes, but he ended up asking me to stay for an hour because he hadn't looked at my resume beforehand. He spent some time reviewing it and then asked me some questions about my current job. After that, he explained the application his team is working on. He then wanted to see if I could understand some code he had written on a whiteboard. I wasn't expecting technical questions in this round, so I hadn't refreshed the technical knowledge I wanted to. I had actually asked the recruiter about the interview format when scheduling, but didn't get a response. Overall, the interview felt friendly and nice. We had a good conversation, but unfortunately, I didn't make it to the second round.