Level Home Interview Questions
& Process

I spoke with all the exec team members and a group of people who would be reporting to me. Then, I had two work sample tests later on. I felt like it was a really good way for us to get to know each other and make sure it was a good fit. The company culture seemed amazing and that really came through during the interviews.

After applying, I got an email from the recruiter a few weeks later. Scheduling the interviews was a bit of a hassle with some communication issues. The initial phone screen was pretty standard. Then I moved on to the second round, where I spoke with the principal engineer. This part involved questions about my past work and gave me a better understanding of the different Level Home teams' projects. I struggled with his questions because they were abstract and general, and I felt I wasn't as prepared as the job description suggested. We didn't have much time, only 20 minutes, so we couldn't go deep into my previous projects. Despite that, I was told I'd advance to the next stage, and the recruiter would contact me to set up the live coding interview (you can choose between live coding or a take-home assignment). The next day, the recruiter informed me they wouldn't proceed with my application because other candidates had more relevant experience for the role. While the interview structure was okay, the communication was lacking, especially regarding scheduling, the exact job requirements, and updates on my application status. The interview process generally followed these steps: 1) Phone Screen 2) 1:1 with Principal Engineer 3) Choice of Live Coding or Take Home 4) System Architecture 5) Final Round (Coding + Technical).

I had an initial call with an external recruiter. After that, I went through a tech interview that seemed to go well, leading to five more interviews. The nature of these subsequent interviews wasn't disclosed beforehand. In total, besides the first tech screen, I had four additional tech screens, each with different difficulty levels. One particular tech interview stood out negatively: I was asked to implement an asynchronous networking call from scratch. While I understand the concepts of making network calls in Swift, the expectation felt unrealistic as this is a task done infrequently in real-world app development and usually only when addressing issues. The interviewer's idea of testing a 'real developer' involved this kind of task.

The internal recruiter had a lot of trouble scheduling. The first interview was with the team manager and was pretty basic. The second interview was supposed to be a HackerRank test, but we didn't do it. Instead, we ended up discussing end-to-end encryption. They're apparently trying to build this "Russian dolls" encryption system where the IoT device has some simplified encryption instead of using TLS 1.3 all the way. It's strange because even ESP8266 can handle TLS 1.3 with WolfSSL. The manager seemed unsure about the company's funding and profitability timeline. I also asked about their strategy to stand out in the saturated smart home market. His response was that they produce their own hardware, which doesn't make much sense if they can't even support TLS 1.3 on it. Honestly, it felt like a recipe for startup failure, so I'd advise staying away from them.