Engine Interview Questions
& Process

The Sr Recruiter hit me up on LinkedIn about the job and set up a call. But on the day, it was one of the worst interview experiences I've ever had. The recruiter was 10 mins late for a 30 min chat and we still finished early cuz they seemed uninterested and unfocused. They barely asked about my background. Mostly I heard about the role and their requirements. Using an AI Notetaker is fine, but to the point where it looked like she wasn't listening, it really showed me that a good candidate experience isn't their priority. Overall it felt rushed and I saw red flags.

After a recruiter reached out on LinkedIn, the whole hiring thing wrapped up in under two weeks. It was super professional and respectful throughout. First, I chatted with the engineering manager, then did a live coding test and a system design problem. Even though I didn't make it, the recruiter emailed back super fast the next day with detailed, helpful feedback on why. I really appreciated that, it made it clear what I gotta work on. It's pretty rare to get that kind of good feedback after an interview.

It was a strange interview process, the team and process was insanely unstructured. The CEO reacted poorly to challenging questions about the high degree of VP+ turnover over the past 2 years. He expects most people to work every weekend. I don't have a problem with periodically working weekends, but the expectation that you must work every weekend is cringe. He definitely has the vibe of someone who will remorselessly ruin your vacation and throw you under the bus when his micromanaging fails. I wouldn't recommend based on my interview experience and conversations with former employees.

I was contacted by a recruiter on LinkedIn and had an initial meeting to discuss the role and process. Then I got a Hackerrank test with 2 hard questions, 'Reduce the string by removing K consecutive identical characters' and another about particles, with only 1 hour to complete both. I managed to finish one, and they accepted it. Next were 3 technical interviews: a live coding exercise to format a list/array based on input and rules, a system design interview focused on DB table structure and pseudocode for financial operations (money withdrawal, transfer, history) and race condition prevention using concepts like pessimistic locking and 2-phase commit, and a project retrospective with an engineering manager where I had to present a project I was proud of, detailing its results and challenges. After the final interview, I was ghosted and received no feedback. My emails to recruiters went unanswered. Many others complain about being ghosted, so it seems to be a company culture issue.