Cloudflare Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

I applied online and also went to a university event. No online tests. First, I had a 30-minute chat with the hiring manager where we mostly talked about my resume and some behavioral stuff. Then, two weeks later, I had a 1-hour technical interview which was a backend pair-programming task. I had to build a simple task scheduler and we talked about how to scale it up, like distributed system ideas.

Got a message from a recruiter on LinkedIn. Then there were 11 interviews. The first few were definitely relevant to the job, like a coding challenge and a system design interview. They got more senior over time, feeling more like conversations. The very last meeting was with Matthew Prince, where they suggested asking just one or two brief questions and then listening. In the middle of the process, someone noticed I had experience in an area they liked, and the job I was interviewing for changed. I'm not sure why 11 interviews are needed. The most I'd had before was 8 interviews when they were considering me for two roles. Ironically, once I accepted the job, none of the senior folks had a moment to chat.

So I had an HR interview first, then I talked to the Engineering Director, and then there was a technical interview. The HR part was pretty standard, and the chat with the Engineering Director was really neat and exciting. But then the technical interview was totally out of left field, like it had nothing to do with the other parts. The person interviewing me seemed kinda nervous and not serious, and told me not to worry about language-specific details (which is tricky for me since I juggle a few languages and don't always remember exact syntax). Even so, I got rejected, and they said it was because I lacked language-specific knowledge. That felt really dishonest because the interviewer specifically said that wasn't the focus. It was also clear they didn't know my background or anything from the earlier interviews. They also didn't say anything about what happens next. It felt super unprofessional compared to the other parts of the process.