Chronosphere Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

Started with a recruiter call, which was cool. They were upfront about salary, which I liked. After that, things went downhill. I had a coding screen that lasted about an hour. The interviewers gave minimal feedback while I was coding, which felt like inexperience. Live coding feels awkward, and I think interviewers should offer some encouragement or guidance. I got barely any feedback. They also told me not to write unit tests, just to test within the main function, which was a bad move. The tests were slow and poorly designed, and unit tests would have made them better. It felt unprofessional. I had a chance to ask questions, but the interviewers seemed tired and their requirements seemed messy. The whole coding screen and follow-up discussion was so bad I almost withdrew. But I got a rejection a few days later, so I didn't have to.

We had an initial casual remote chat. I talked with the head of engineering about the company and its work, just to see if we were a good fit. It went well, the person was nice and answered my questions. Then there was a more formal chat with the same person, or maybe another engineer. This one was more about my background and expertise. The next steps were supposed to be a technical assignment, a technical interview, and a soft skills interview or two. But they mentioned they were really looking for more senior folks with experience in large distributed systems and high loads, which I didn't have. Still, they were upfront and nice about it, making it feel like a pleasant conversation.

The interview started with a recruiter phone call. The recruiter spoke really fast, making it hard to catch everything. They mentioned the technical screen would focus on communication, but the interviewer didn't seem to care much about that. The technical interview itself was pretty standard, not heavy on LeetCode problems, but more about reading through a chunk of existing code and then writing new code based on a long prompt. It required multithreading. I managed to complete most of the prompt, except for a small part involving copying and pasting an existing if statement with a minor variable change, which we ran out of time for. I think maybe they wanted to see that done. What was most notable was the interviewer seemed to strictly want code that matched their specific solution. But in coding, there are many ways to achieve the same result, like rearranging conditions in an if-statement. I also ran into some compilation errors for a bit, which might have hurt my chances.