Haven Technologies Fullstack Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

I applied through BuiltInNYC, which lists jobs for NY tech startups. First, I had a recruiter call to get acquainted and go over the interview process. Then, I spoke with a developer who had me detail past projects and asked questions about them. The last interview was a technical coding interview with several developers. It was pretty simple. I got an offer in December, but about four months later, the recruiter informed me that the company was cutting programs, including internships, so the offer was rescinded.

It was a pretty standard process you'd find at a tech company. I started with a recruiter call where we talked about the role and the interview steps. The first round involved talking with a senior engineer about my background, experience, and tech skills. Then we dove into system design, covering things like microservices, frontend design, and general architecture. The second round was a take-home assignment with a detailed system design and coding challenge. They wanted not just the design but also scalable code that I had to run to show it worked. The final stage was a discussion about my background, followed by drawing a system design on a whiteboard, where I had to show a solid grasp of the system and its underlying tech. Finally, I was asked two LeetCode medium problems, with the expectation of further challenging follow-up questions.

The first on-line behavioral interview went really well. After that, they set up a first on-line technical interview. The HR person told me it would cover discussing technical aspects of my current role, system design, frontend/backend questions, and maybe framework-specific questions if there was time. But, the interview ended up being partly about my current role, and mostly about algorithms, data structures, design patterns, and SQL. I'm familiar with those topics, but I hadn't prepared for them because I was expecting a totally different interview. It's a shame I spent my weekend prepping for system design, only for the interviewer to conduct their own version of the interview. I feel like if topics are agreed upon for an interview, the interviewer should stick to them, ethically speaking.