CrowdStrike Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

I went through several rounds with engineers and managers from two distinct teams: the auth team and the cloud engineering team. My initial rounds were with the cloud engineering team, who were very professional. They asked standard LeetCode-style questions and queries about handling race conditions. Following that, I had two more rounds with the auth team. The first was with an engineer, which was quite a poor experience. They seemed overwhelmed with a high-severity issue and couldn't focus, yet proceeded with the interview despite my offer to reschedule. It involved a medium-level LeetCode problem, which I'm confident I solved correctly. They provided no feedback on the code and seemed eager to end the call. The final round was with a manager from the auth team, whose main goal appeared to be finding someone willing to work without questioning. The entire experience with the auth team suggested a poor team culture, and I'd advise avoiding them. My sympathy goes out to any good people still on that team.

They had an initial interview set up, but it got cancelled last minute and they rescheduled it. The interviewer was fine. Typical interview questions were asked, like 'tell me about yourself' and 'why do you want to leave your current job?'. They also directly asked if I was a citizen, PR, or on a visa, and if so, what type. I think that's very unprofessional and possibly illegal in Canada; they should just ask if I'm legally entitled to work in Canada. I haven't heard back from them.

The interview process included 4 rounds. The first was with the Hiring Manager who asked high-level technical questions about microservices, focusing on availability, reliability, and scalability. This was followed by a discussion about my past experiences, assignments, and challenges. Behavioral questions for a Technical Lead role were also covered, including conflict management scenarios. The second round involved theoretical microservices questions and system design (no coding). Topics included caching, circuit breakers, CQRS, CAP theorem, and authentication basics. The system design part was to design a feature similar to Facebook's news feed, emphasizing read-heavy aspects, CQRS, microservices, message queues, eventual consistency, and KPI monitoring. The third round was a coding challenge within 50 minutes to find the shortest path in a map. The fourth round was a take-home system design assignment to design an API for file analysis, with an option for a longer in-person system design round instead. The assignment involved designing the API, writing a small program, and discussing global scale implementation and deployment. I didn't complete the fourth round because I had another offer.