Natera Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

The interview process had two main parts. First was a 20-minute call with a recruiter, and second was a 45-minute Zoom with the hiring manager. Since it was for a senior spot, I thought it would be more about behavior or projects. The first 15 minutes felt like chatting about personal stuff, like why I stayed at my first job for a long time or why I moved here. Then they gave a quick 5-minute rundown of what the team's product does. Even with my 12+ years of experience, they only asked about my current job, not my past roles which were more relevant. The rest of the time was spent on questions about my current job. With about 9 minutes left, the hiring manager asked me to share my screen and do a LeetCode-style coding problem. But the software didn't even let me run the code. The hiring manager even said that type of exercise wasn't ideal for senior folks, which made me wonder why they used it. They offered to continue the Zoom after the scheduled time, but I couldn't stay. Because of the coding exercise, I ran out of time to ask about the role itself. Two days later, I got a generic rejection email that didn't even have a specific sender.

So I applied for a role, and then they changed the job description to add Java spring framework as a nice to have. I ended up interviewing for a job that didn't match the original description. They told me the 4th round would be on MySQL, Spring Core, and Spring Boot. I had already spent time learning a framework I didn't know, and I thought they'd ask about Spring Hibernate with MySQL, but they didn't ask any Spring questions and instead grilled me on SQL queries. I know I should have prepared SQL, but I don't think a SQL interview is the best way to assess someone. After 4 interviews, I was ghosted for over two weeks. The first interview was about the role and company, and I had to describe myself. The second was a personality interview. The third, I picked a language and had to count character occurrences in a string. The fourth was about SQL queries.

The interview process was straightforward. It started with a recruiter call, followed immediately by the first round of interviews. After passing that, I was given a take-home assignment, which was a new topic for me but I managed to complete it. Then, there was a final technical round involving some easy LeetCode problems. Everyone I met was very friendly, and the overall interview experience was relaxed.