Duda Interview Questions
& Process

You get a home assignment for 3 hours, you have to build a REST api with some CRUD operations. You have a pupil and a school, you have to add a pupil into the DB and the school. Also you have to build a friendship between two pupils (which is bi-directional) and enroll a student into a school. The difficult part is to do it in 3 hours.

The interview process had 3 stages. First, a take-home test where you had to write a shell script for AWS LB tasks like removing a node from a target group. If not done perfectly, you'd be declined. Second, a technical interview. They reviewed your script, asked questions about it, and also about Linux, k8s, and AWS. They also asked about your general experience. Third, an interview with the CTO or a product manager. This involved general experience questions and a riddle. Not solving the riddle meant a decline, regardless of technical skills. I passed the take-home but didn't solve the riddle and missed one question in the technical interview, which they flagged as a concern. The process felt a bit negative with unclear expectations regarding whether they wanted a technical person or a riddle solver.

Originally, I was set up for a phone interview with a recruiter. When it came time to book it, there wasn't anything open for two weeks, so I had to schedule it way out. Then, about a week before that call, they hit me up to move it up a whole week with hardly any heads-up. So instead, I ended up talking to the hiring manager. This person seemed really checked out and like they made up their mind about me right away based on my career path and experience so far.

So the process kicked off with a chat with HR, where they laid out the role details and inquired about my salary expectations. Then, I was given a 3-hour take-home assignment to build a system using React. I managed to pass that, and after that, I had a Zoom interview focused on Java. During this call, they threw a coding question at me: could I find out if a linked list had a circle and, if so, calculate its length using the two-pointer technique? Following that, I had a system design interview on-site. The task was to design a system for ordering concert tickets, which I unfortunately didn't pass. Overall, the whole experience was quite good and a learning opportunity. HR kept me updated every couple of days after each stage, and the interviews themselves felt very professional. It's a shame I haven't encountered many opportunities like this since then. A really good company, based on my initial impression.