Ironclad Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

The interview process involved a technical screen. The team is testing a new coding platform, which caused some technical difficulties for about 30 minutes, requiring troubleshooting with an IT partner. The coding assessment was scheduled for an hour, but the candidate initially thought it was two hours. The candidate felt an additional 30 minutes would have been helpful to complete the solution and test cases. The candidate suggested that for senior positions, more time should be allocated to coding assessments to allow engineers to better showcase their skills, rather than focusing on algorithmic coding trivia in a timed test.

So Ironclad's interview loop is a bit more involved than what you usually see in Silicon Valley. It starts with a recruiter call. If that goes well, you'll chat with the Hiring Manager. After that, there's a technical screen where they'll likely give you a coding question, and they really like to use Typescript, so be ready for that and to explain your thought process. Then comes the panel interviews. First, they'll actually demo Ironclad to you, which is pretty cool because it's a niche product, and it gives you a good feel for the user experience and how the app performs. The panel itself includes a standard behavioral interview and a systems design interview. The unique part of the panel is the Technical Project, where you have about 1.5 hours to build a simple product. Don't expect to finish it, just focus on outlining the main parts and filling in the important details. Afterwards, you'll discuss your solution with an interviewer and answer their questions.

My Journey with Ironclad started with a call with a recruiter. After the phone screen, I moved on to a short coding round with a software engineer on the team. It was about an hour long and was a pretty fun, typical coding round. I got to spend time chatting with the engineer after and hear their perspective on IC. I was approved to move on to the onsite round. There were three sections -- a demo of the product, a chat with the Director of Eng, and a coding project (took the most amount of time). A unique thing that IC did was the demo. All other companies I did had their onsite very focused on coding/technical knowledge. I really liked being able to see what the team was building and being able to see the employees get excited about what they've built and where they see the product going. The chat with the Director was just that, a conversation about problem solving process, what we find valuable while working on a team, and what the future of IC could be. The project was a little nerve wracking at first. It was about 2.5 hours to code/come up with solutions for a larger problem statement given. After the 2.5 hours, there was a 30min debrief where I was able to go over my code, explain what I was thinking and also talking about what I was planning to do for the next steps. This was a great feel for what a code review could look like and felt very collaborative. After receiving an offer, I also had the chance to speak with their COO. It was an amazing opportunity and showed me the care they put into forming a good team.