NorthOne Interview Questions
& Process

I had a recruiter screening call. It was a set of questions and they took notes, which I found odd given their limited scope. I prefer a more conversational interview, but this wasn't it. I didn't get much time to learn about the company. The entire process involved meeting about 10 people, which is a significant portion of their staff. The role involved managing a product manager and two designers, plus being an individual contributor for another pod. It seemed like a strange setup, and based on my interview and others' feedback, the company itself might be a bit unusual.

The interview process was pretty typical. I started by speaking to a recruiter, then had a culture interview with someone from the People Team. After that, I received a take-home assessment. The third round involved speaking with the CEO, CPO, and some stakeholders. Everything went smoothly, and I felt I did well on their questions. However, it wasn't clear what they were evaluating at each stage or what they were looking for. Despite investing a lot of time, I was ghosted and didn't receive any feedback on why they decided not to proceed with my application.

Had an intro call with the recruiter for about 20 minutes with some general questions. Then there was a take-home challenge where I had to implement a serverless GraphQL API for a transaction ledger. After that, I had a technical interview with two senior engineers, which lasted an hour. This interview felt a bit unplanned. It was supposed to be about the take-home challenge, but they barely touched on it, asking only superficial questions. Instead, they dove deep into other topics, seemingly more interested in the technologies they use (Node, GraphQL, Serverless, Event-Driven, No-SQL) than the actual problem. It was odd because they didn't know basic stats like active users or traffic volume.

It was a pretty standard process. First, I communicated with a third-party recruiter and N1 directly via LinkedIn. There were three main calls: one with Talent, one with my direct manager (the current DevOps lead), and a final one with a senior developer and upper management. The first call was to gauge my experience and career aspirations. They also gave me a brief company and role overview. After that, I got a coding challenge. I needed to request an extension due to prior work commitments, which they thankfully granted with extra time, showing flexibility and understanding. Once I submitted the challenge, I met with my manager. We discussed infrastructure design questions based on given scenarios. Since it was a DevOps role, it focused more on problem-solving approaches and limitations rather than pure coding. I was invited to the next interview shortly after. This last interview was mainly to assess cultural fit. I talked about my background, career journey, and motivations. It involved people from different teams, including a non-technical role, to ensure I'd fit company-wide. They gave me the decision a few hours later, and I accepted the offer the following week. Onboarding was smooth, and I started three weeks later.