CloudKitchens Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

I applied through LinkedIn and a recruiter reached out. They gave me a take-home assignment. The assignment involved a REST API and a seed; I had to run my code against the seed and submit the results. A test harness would then indicate if my output passed or failed. There were a few issues: first, they apparently didn't pull my latest code, even though I submitted it before the deadline. Second, it seemed like the team confused parallel processing with concurrency. Third, they claimed the tests weren't passing, despite me running them for days. Finally, even though I based my solution on well-known open-source software, it was still considered invalid. The process basically involves a recruiter contact followed by a take-home assignment where you use a provided REST API with a seed, run your code, and submit it for testing. The test harness tells you if you pass or fail.

I had a recruiter screen, then a 1 hour DSA interview, followed by a 5 hour live coding interview. After that, there was another 1 hour DSA interview and a 1 hour system design interview. I finished the 5 hour one and then the recruiter ghosted me even though I followed up. The interviewers were super cold, acted like Travis Kalanick was a god, and didn't seem to care about me at all. They asked questions that were unclear and seemed to want really specific answers. It was a really bad experience overall.

Here's how the Software Engineer E4 hiring process went down: It started with a recruiter from CloudKitchens who did an initial HR screen. Then, there was a 1-hour technical phone screen. I had a bit of trouble getting started, but after about 20 minutes, I figured out a solution using hashmaps/dictionaries and managed to finish it with just 5 minutes to spare. I got to ask the engineer some questions and then moved on to the final onsite interviews. The onsite consisted of three parts: a 3-hour project where I was advised to brush up on API development, multithreading, concurrency, test coverage, and making requests to a swagger API. After that, there was a 1-hour deep dive into the 3-hour project, where they asked about potential extra features and follow-ups, and I might have had to try implementing them. Finally, there was a 1-hour deep dive into a past project I had worked on. I had to present low-level, middle-level, and high-level details of the project to the engineering manager, making sure they'd understand it well. I was told to draw a detailed Excalidraw diagram of the project beforehand. Apparently, I didn't do well enough on the 3-hour project and that's why I was rejected. I finished most of the requirements, but I only found out during the deep dive that the API was supposed to fetch data from the swagger API. I also didn't manage to include any test coverage.