Elastic Cloud Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

The interview process kicked off with a recruiter screening. After that, there were 6 interviews in total: the first three were with technical folks, and the last three were with management. All interviews were done over Zoom. Technical interviews covered my background, coding discussions, some coding exercises (like dealing with HTTP requests and data sorting/filtering/grouping), and system design questions. Management interviews were mostly behavioral, though one got pretty technical. They really focused on cultural fit, which makes sense for a distributed company like Elastic. The whole thing took about 6 weeks. I felt the process was fair and aimed at finding engineers who can solve real problems, not just ace algorithm tests. My main gripes are the length of the process and that pay wasn't discussed until the very end.

I was super keen to apply to Elastic because I've been a fan and user of their products for a while, and this role seemed to be a perfect match for my background. I figured it would be enough to at least land an interview. Initially, my application got no reply, so I ended up fixing some of their product issues on GitHub and then pinged a recruiter on LinkedIn. That got me an initial chat with a recruiter. After that, I had a technical interview where they asked about my programming language skills, among other things. The job posting mentioned 'experience with languages X or Y' as a must-have, and I had X. However, the interview heavily focused on languages Y and Z (which wasn't even mentioned in the job posting!). Even so, the conversation felt pretty good. The following week, I heard they went with other candidates who had more experience. Unfortunately, I didn't even get to the point of answering technical or coding questions. If the job description had actually reflected the questions they asked, I would have prepared very differently. Despite my excitement for the company and its offerings, the interview process left a sour taste.

After sending my resume, I had an initial chat with a recruiter. It was a good conversation, and I thought they were quite technical for a recruiter, asking about my background and distributed systems experience. I requested a couple of weeks to prep for the interviews, but work and family stuff made it tough. Then, I went through several interviews with engineers from Spain, France, and the US. They were all humble and great engineers, some even core open-source contributors and one was an Apache Software Foundation member. It really felt like an engineering-focused company, and I enjoyed the talks. The last two interviews were with the Engineering Manager and VP of Engineering, focusing on cultural fit and learning about the engineering culture and priorities. Lastly, a quick compensation discussion with the recruiter, under 20 minutes. The scheduling worked out really well despite the different time zones.