Newsela Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

A recruiter from Indeed Prime reached out, and after a couple of technical phone screens, I got invited to their office in Midtown. The onsite interviews went pretty well, and the Director of Technology even told me I nailed the technical questions. The recruiter said he'd call the next week, but never did. After about 3 emails and 2 weeks later, they emailed me saying I wasn't technically the right fit.

Got referred by a friend for the Senior Software Engineer role at Newsela. About a week later, the Sr. Recruiter reached out for a call to discuss my background and salary expectations. They liked what they heard and wanted to continue. The interview process had four main parts: First, I met with the Sr. Director of Engineering (Hiring Manager). We discussed my background, I learned about the team and their work, and I was asked some basic JS questions. Then, I got a take-home coding exercise to finish in a week. After that, we reviewed the take-home exercise. This led to more technical questions about my previous work, accessibility, async/await, server-side, and cookies. Next, I had a behavioral interview with the Hiring Manager, covering standard behavioral questions. Finally, I met with the Product Manager, who explained their role and asked more typical behavioral questions. The whole experience was pretty good and felt more like a chat.

So, it was a four-step thing, you know? Two calls and then two quick on-sites. The recruiter was on the ball. First up was a chat with the technical recruiter, we talked about what the company does, my goals, and how their engineering team works. He didn't have all the answers about the tech stuff, so he set up another call to get those sorted. Then came the second call, this time with an ops engineer. They cleared up my remaining questions about their process and we just chatted about technical things. After that, the first of the two on-sites. This one had three parts: a product chat with a PM and QA where we discussed management approaches, a technical session with two engineers about some code I'd sent, and another technical session with two more engineers where they really probed my experience with a bunch of standalone questions. That last bit was pretty different, not like traditional whiteboarding, but honestly, a much better way to gauge someone's background, I think. Finally, the second on-site. This also had three parts: a meeting with the CTO, one with an Educator Specialist, and another with an Engineer. We covered the business model, where they're headed, what users are saying, and the engineering vibe. Overall, the engineers were super welcoming, really into people exploring different parts of the stack, and communication between teams seemed solid. It feels like a good time to join, with interesting challenges ahead and plans to grow thoughtfully. They were super responsive too, the recruiter always got back within a day or two. I was in a hurry, so they even scheduled the second on-site for the same week as the first, and I got a decision and a verbal offer the day after that.