Grafana Labs Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

standard process - call with the recruiter, a short talk with the hiring manager and the leet code like coding session. The coding session experience was quite poor. The two engineers appeared in the the call started the discussion by playing a role of supportive collaborators, saying they were to help me through the process and that its their goal to have me succeeded. I never heard them saying a word in the following 55 minutes. They just kept it very quite. I presented my solution which was sub optimal as i missed some bits of the problem at the very beginning of the interview, but they never navigate me. So, overall, poor engineering.

The interview process was pretty standard. It kicked off with an HR interview, followed by a Manager interview, and then a technical interview. The technical part involved a take-home exercise done on my own computer, with a pairing session afterward. They gave me a project a few days before the pairing session, so I had time to work on it. It took about an hour to complete the main tasks, not counting setup. During the pairing session, I had to do a quick code walkthrough and then tackle some extra tasks to build on it. They were cool with using Google or other resources during the session. The backend was mocked, so it was all about the UI, specifically React. They seemed to be looking for deep React knowledge. Completing the tasks was straightforward, and it felt like a good test of practical development skills. The manager mentioned looking for "extreme high performers" who are "hyper autonomous." The pay didn't quite match the expected expertise and autonomy, which was a bit of a concern. Also, they seemed to discourage taking PTO, suggesting long sabbaticals instead of regular breaks, which sounds like a recipe for burnout. Collaboration and team building seemed minimal. The whole process dragged on for 9 weeks, with about 3 weeks of silence between each stage. I initially thought the holidays might be the reason, but that only explains one gap. It took so long that I assumed they had ghosted me and accepted another offer before they got back after the technical interview. This slow pace might indicate a tendency to compare candidates rather than evaluate them objectively against job criteria.

It was a typical 4 stage interview process. Started with a recruiter chat, then an interview with the hiring manager, followed by a coding assessment, and finally a systems design interview. The whole time they were super responsive and kept me in the loop, which was nice. I was kinda nervous reading some other reviews but didn't run into any of those issues. A good chunk of the behavioral part is to check if you can work on your own and also if you can work well with people in different time zones. The coding part wasn't like LeetCode, it was more about a real-world scenario. Basically, they want to see how you tackle problems and explain your thoughts and issues to others.