Intercom Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

I interviewed for a role in Dublin. The process was long but very fair. The interview schedule all ran smoothly, the interviewers were friendly and I received great resources to help me prep for each of the sessions. From first contact to offer took about 4 weeks, partially due to limitations with my own availability. The process involved: a recruiter call, a values session (which was a great session, structured around STAR style questions but didn't hold too rigorously to them, allowing conversation to flow well), a live coding session (where I was given a class for assigning support chat messages to agents, and had to add state and complete methods), a minicom session (UI and backend API for a messaging problem), and a data modelling session (again, based around a messaging problem).

The interview process had 3 steps before I was ghosted with no feedback or automated email. I asked for feedback once and received silence. There are more stages than I went through, which are explained by the recruiter in the first round. The recruiter call was nice, and they seemed to need a developer but were very picky, trying to get as many candidates as possible. They mentioned work visa sponsorship for non-EU candidates, which suggests they are desperate. The second part of the second round indicates they look for people with a similar mindset and aspirations. I wish they started with the values assessment before the coding challenge to save time. Overall, the recruiter was a 5/5, but post-rejection communication was a 1/5. The coding challenge was 5/5, and the values assessment was 5/5, but considering the entire experience felt like a 'mine field,' it's a 1/5 because it was a waste of time. The company might waste resources, but they have high internal priorities. Despite a 3.4 rating, I'm disappointed by the ghosting, as I expected at least an automated message given their emphasis on communication. Even candidate.fyi doesn't help as they don't update candidate status, leading to profiles being marked as stale or rejected in bulk. My expectation of basic courtesy wasn't met.

This was a really long interview process but I actually enjoyed it a lot. It started with a recruiter screen, then a coding round where I saw a LeetCode Medium problem about user ping intervals and array partitioning. After that, there was a values round with many behavioral questions, so I'd recommend checking the company values to prepare. Then came two more coding rounds: one solo where I built a mini-Intercom project, and another where I paired with an engineer who was quite helpful and friendly. Next was a data modeling round focusing on database design concepts like ER diagrams and normalization. We then had a role chat with an Engineering Manager where I could ask about the company and the role. If you pass this stage, you move to the Hiring Manager round. Just a heads-up, this doesn't guarantee an offer; if the HM says no, it's a no-hire. For the HM round, brush up on your behaviorals, product sense, and full-stack development knowledge. I got an offer in the end! The whole experience was very positive and everyone was friendly. Sadly, I couldn't accept the offer but I'd definitely reapply later.