Indigo Interview Questions
& Process

The interview process was pretty straightforward and I ended up getting the job. They asked some standard questions like 'tell me about yourself' and 'why you wanna work here'. They also asked about my availability, and that was pretty much it.

I applied and a few days later, I got asked to schedule an initial interview/screening with a recruiter. The interview was good and the recruiter was very professional. By the end of the week, she sent a follow-up email saying I would hear an update by the beginning of next week. I eventually found out they moved on with other candidates. Disappointing because I really liked the position but I get that I was probably not the most qualified.

First, I had a 30-minute phone screen with talent acquisition where they asked typical background questions and mentioned they'd follow up if I moved on. Then, talent acquisition emailed me to set up a Zoom tech screen with the hiring manager. Unfortunately, the hiring manager didn't show up. I contacted talent acquisition, and after hours of waiting, they apologized and said they'd reschedule. Days later, talent acquisition set up another Zoom tech screen, this time with a different engineering manager, not the actual hiring manager. During this screen, I answered work-related background questions and solved a Leetcode medium problem, which impressed the manager, who then invited me to a 'virtual on-site.' The virtual on-site involved meeting the actual hiring manager, a product/business team member, and two software engineers individually. These sessions included simple live coding and 'collaborative' system design questions. Everything went well, and I felt good about my chances. After a week with no response, I followed up with talent acquisition. A week after that, I finally got a rejection citing 'lack of experience.' They claimed it took over 3 weeks to respond because they liked me but were checking for other team fits, despite my experience being on my resume. This felt like a disorganized and confusing process, and I doubt their stated reason. They never indicated experience was an issue, making the whole 2+ month ordeal feel like a waste of time.

I heard back about my staff-level application on Feb 7th, and the whole thing didn't wrap up until March 28th. For pretty much the whole first month, I was chatting with three different hiring managers. Two of them had major headaches trying to set up a phone screen because their scheduling system was being a pain, so my application sat in limbo for 23 days labeled 'requested interviewee availability' (my inside source told me this). One of the hiring managers was actually a contractor who bounced before my application was even done. Another manager just sent me a bare-bones email to set up a phone screen, and it still had gibberish in it like 'recruiter to specify PHONE/ZOOM and delete this text'. I was really stoked about what the company does, so I hit up another hiring manager I'd talked to last year to sort out the mess. My two-paragraph cover letter gushing about the company's mission? Apparently, not a single interviewer saw it. After the final 6-hour interview block, the hiring manager I was dealing with took off for a long weekend, so I didn't get any feedback until Monday morning at 9 am. First up was an engineering manager who grilled me on my work history, how I handle empathy at work, and we talked through the product. It was a solid chat. Then came a Coderpad interview where I got the first question listed below. I didn't quite nail it, but got 'really good' feedback (guess my thinking-out-loud was a plus?) and got moved to the final round, which was a marathon 6 hours of interviews. I1: I talked with a senior technical director about my previous projects and we dove deep into some architectures. Really engaging discussion about architecture. I2: Another Coderpad session, this time with Q2 from below. Two interviewers. I3: A whiteboarding question, Q4 below. Two interviewers. I4: An interview with an engineering manager. They asked about my background and dug into a few of my past projects with some probing questions. Another engaging one. They even threw in a couple of weird questions that I thought were pretty cool and not your typical stuff. I5: Coderpad again, Q3 from the list. Two interviewers. I6: An interview with a senior product manager. They showed me a demo of the product and asked about my past dealings with product teams, specifically looking for times I ran into challenges and how I resolved them. This company's hiring process is a total dumpster fire. 9 hours of interviews, with 3 of those spent coding in Coderpad, and one of the most boring whiteboarding sessions I've ever had, and they told me I 'wasn't technical enough' for their staff role. It's wild that Leetcode is the main thing they judge candidates on for this level. And three Leetcode problems for someone with almost 10 years of experience? Why weren't the deep-dive architecture talks done on a whiteboard too? And why weren't there more architecture questions? It's insane that they wasted so much money flying in 14 people to talk to me for 8 or 9 hours only to decide I'm not cut out for the job.