loanDepot Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

It was a three-stage interview process. First, a recruiter call to filter. Then, a manager interview focusing on knowledge and personality. Finally, a team interview for technical knowledge. The last technical interview was the most difficult, but all stages were very professional and personal. Everyone made me feel comfortable, interested in me and my background, and gave me the chance to talk freely.

I applied online and then a recruiter from corporate IT reached out for a phone interview. He asked me a few technical questions on C#, specifically about access modifiers, inheritance from classes versus interfaces, and the Big O notation for hash tables. Following that, I had a second phone interview with a senior software engineer. This interview involved an interactive scenario where I had to troubleshoot why a ZIP code validator was responding slowly. It was a good exercise to talk through my thought process, but my suggestion to implement it in C# rather than the database didn't seem to impress him. I think he might have been looking for more specific details, like using a sorted dictionary with LINQ or a specific search algorithm. The corporate recruiter called me back the next business day to let me know I didn't perform strongly enough on the technical exercise. I didn't get to the onsite interviews. They were nice and tried to be helpful on the phone, which I appreciate.

2 sets of interviews on separate days. The first day I met individually with 3 software managers and it was more technical. The second day was with a senior manager and the CTO.