Nextag Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

I had my first phone call with Nextag where they asked for some basic info about me. About a week later, I had another call where the interviewer brought up some issues with my resume projects and then asked about HTTP requests and serialization. A week after that, I went to their office for a round of interviews covering binary search (complexity), recursion (writing simple code), how MapReduce works, heap data structures, dynamic binding, and basic OOP concepts like classes and objects and their relationships.

I talked to the recruiter who then set me up for two phone screens. One was supposed to be with a senior person to talk about the company, and the other was a general tech screen. The tech screen was pretty simple but involved a lot of coding. The senior person kept rescheduling and eventually missed the call, then called back late when I had already left. This call was strange; he asked if I was at a computer and then jumped into a tech interview instead of discussing the company. He also asked some odd behavioral questions quite aggressively. I didn't pay it much mind until I got the invitation for an onsite. The onsite wasn't bad, the engineers seemed smart and asked standard data structure/algorithm questions. I then met the same guy from the weird phone screen. He was still acting like a jerk, and afterward, when I asked about the timeline for a decision, he basically told me to take other offers because they move slowly. I was shocked. A few days later, they sent a mediocre offer that I might have considered if not for the bizarre vibe from that one person.

It was a 5 round exhausting interview process, covering everything from puzzles, data structures, programming skills, and design patterns. They really dug into every answer to check for deep conceptual knowledge. Overall, it was a very interesting experience and the HR team was very helpful.