Kiavi Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

The whole thing dragged on for like two months. It started with the recruiter hitting me up on LinkedIn. There were supposed to be three rounds, mostly just engineering stuff, no product interviews at all. They were upfront about the pay, like 120k USD as a contractor, *wink wink LATAM engineers*. Then, out of the blue, they threw in an extra round for pair programming, kinda like those Amazon ones where they want to 'raise the bar'. Not sure if that was just me, though. The last round didn't go so hot because, honestly, the recruiter was super vague about what to expect until I pushed in that last interview, and then boom, 3 hours of tech interviews with no real heads-up or prep time. Plus, I'm not great with JS, and that was one of the only languages allowed (Ruby, JS, Python). The interviewers were nice enough, some really wanted to get to know me as an engineer, others were super strict, like FAANG, expecting the 'right' answers without any room for brainstorming. After that last one, it went dead silent for days. I figured I was ghosted. I tried to follow up after two days, but got an auto-reply saying the recruiter was out of office. Ten days later, I got the rejection email, which offered feedback, but I was so over it, I couldn't even be bothered to reply. Never felt so ignored by a startup before. I wouldn't even consider them again unless they completely revamp this process.

Applied through the company careers page and got a quick response. They sent over an online assessment on HackerRank, which I thought was well-designed. After that, I had a Hangouts interview with one of their engineers. This interview covered both behavioral aspects and technical skills, with a focus on my project design choices and their application. The final round involved three one-hour interviews back-to-back, making it a bit challenging time-wise, but the interviewers were patient and the conversations were enjoyable. The recruiter was also very helpful and rescheduled one of my interviews to fit around my school commitments. Overall, it was a great interview experience.

The interview had two parts: a 30-minute intro chat and a 1-hour technical session. The technical part was mostly about 45 minutes. I felt like I was more focused on finding clever ways to solve the problem than just finding any solution. Right at the start, I mentioned my initial idea, but was told to go with a simpler approach first. Later, I was allowed to implement my original plan. I'm not sure if I could have progressed faster without being pushed to build a less ideal solution first, especially when the assignment later added complexities that made that initial solution less relevant. It's better to write adaptable code and be allowed to solve problems the best way you know how. If the goal is to see how I think, it's frustrating to have my thought process steered, especially when it feels like I'm being prevented from starting with my preferred method, which is where I would have ended up anyway, and all within a time limit. I was told it would be a 'blank slate' coding task, but there was existing code, tests, and a small dataset. This wasn't a major issue, but it was a bit odd. I did appreciate the feedback I received afterwards about the interview and areas for improvement. The people I spoke with were friendly and interesting.