HouseCanary Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

I was contacted by a recruiter and after a brief initial call, we set up a technical video chat. In that call, I spoke with a Senior Engineer. We were supposed to do a coding challenge, but instead, we discussed my experience and the role, and they asked some technical follow-up questions like how to populate a dropdown with a lot of data from an API. Soon after, I was scheduled for a virtual onsite. The onsite had 3 technical interviews and 1 behavioral interview. Two of the technical interviews involved easy/medium algorithm questions similar to LeetCode or Pramp. The third technical interview was about plotting points on a graph, and it was a bit hard to understand the interviewer due to a strong accent. The behavioral interview wasn't really a discussion; it was more about listening to the interviewer's yearly goals and their team rebuilding plans. A couple of days post-onsite, the recruiter emailed asking for a quick chat, only to inform me of my rejection and suggest staying in touch.

I applied online and got an email from the recruiter, Mike, who was my main contact. He called to chat about HouseCanary and my resume. After that, I had a HackerRank coding challenge, which had some technical issues at first. Mike helped fix it, and I got to retake it, also realizing I made a mistake. Then, a senior engineer called me for a phone coding test. They asked about my resume and then gave me coding questions, which were like Easy HackerRank problems. The on-site interview came next. I got a T-shirt as a thank you. Mike gave a product demo, and then I met with 5 interviewers. The interviews weren't super structured; each person focused on different things. Most interviews included general programming chat, my experiences, and technical questions. The CTO took me for coffee (sodas, actually) and asked broad questions like what technologies I'm excited about. The most technical interview was with the same senior engineer from the phone screen, doing a Python coding challenge and a SQL challenge together. Two days later, the CEO called with simple questions about my background and why I wanted to join HouseCanary, before saying they'd make an offer. About 30 minutes later, Mike and I discussed the offer details over the phone. Two days after that, we finalized everything on the phone, and he emailed the offer. I accepted right away because I really wanted to work there and the offer was good. Mike kept me updated on every step and if anything was delayed, which was great compared to other companies.

So the interview process was pretty standard. I had a phone screen where I met with an engineer and a product person. Since I lived close by, I just went into their office for it. Then I had my onsite interview, which was with 4 engineers and 1 product manager. They were really efficient. I got a call from the CEO the same night, and then the offer the very next day. The offer was really good, like 20K more in base pay than my other offers and a good chunk of equity, they even told me the fraction which was cool. But I had another offer from a big company, and I hemmed and hawed for almost two weeks. I ended up picking the big company because I figured I needed the immediate cash and a stable job for my family.