Instabase Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

The recruiter Julien first chatted with me over the phone about the company and product. Even though I wasn't actively job searching, the discussion made me want to meet Anant, the CEO. We had a lengthy 1-2 hour coffee chat where he demoed the product, which really sold me on the company. They were super flexible with my schedule, and we set up an onsite interview for a few weeks later. The onsite itself lasted a couple of hours and was mainly a technical interview, covering system design, architecture, and a coding challenge. I had plenty of time to ask questions, meet the team, and gauge the culture. I felt like I could really fit in. Julien and the team got back to me quickly with an offer the very next day.

HR from Instahyre reached out to me after seeing my profile. I went through 4 coding rounds on Coderpad, where my code worked as expected, and a system design round via hangout. Then, I went to the Instabase office for a final discussion, expecting an offer soon. However, a few days later, they informed me they weren't proceeding with my application, which felt like a waste of time. They did discuss their current project, which is still in its early stages, and that part was impressive.

It started with an HR phone call, then a 1-hour technical interview, and finally a last round. The interviewer was really bad at explaining the problem. I was given a 1500-line input to scroll through, which took ages. I had to keep asking the interviewer to switch tabs on their Zoom share screen so I could see the problem and the expected output. It was the absolute worst interview experience ever. I solved the problem in 15 minutes, but the interviewer wasn't convinced the solution was correct because the platform terminal was smaller than the text output, making it look incorrect even though it was fine in a different code editor.