Ocient Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

I applied online and got sent a HackerRank coding assessment. After that, I had a 15-minute call with the hiring manager who told me the next steps. It would be two live HackerRank coding interviews, then a panel interview. They might have another interview after that if they needed more info on my skills. I did the first coding screen, which was a 45-minute live HackerRank BFS problem, and then I got rejected.

Decent enough interview cycle for a senior engineering role. Recruiter was friendly and accommodating of my schedule since I was on holiday when they first reached out to me. We started interviewing a few days after I returned home and I made it through three rounds and got to the final round, as the hiring manager put it. Since the conversation naturally evolved to showing off some side projects of mine via screen share, where I walked the hiring manager and senior on the team through the code, showed them how things got deployed and how I built a security model the application and infrastructure, they decided to not give me a coding assessment but I was asked a set of deeply technical questions and scenarios-which seemed fair-and I got excellent feedback during that my responses were good and right in line with what they were looking for. The recruiter said I should hear from them rapidly as he prefers to keep candidates in the loop and keep things smooth for everyone… …except I didn’t hear back from them for a few weeks so I decided to check the careers page again, the role was no longer present, I email the recruiter for a follow up, and it was only then that I got what looked automated response that the role had been filled. The overall experience was fine I guess, but a little professional courtesy of saying “thank you for interviewing with us but we moved on” would have at least softened the blow from not being chosen for what looked like a pretty interesting job role instead of leaving me to find out on my own after two weeks of radio silence.

Had an initial online assessment that lasted about 1.5 hours. It involved a substantial problem that was tough to finish all test cases within the time limit. The tasks weren't technically complex but required a significant amount of work. Following that, there were two coding interviews, which weren't overly challenging. The process involved collaborating with the interviewer to solve problems incrementally. Then, there was a discussion with the hiring manager, which was mainly conversational. The next stage is a system design review, which I haven't completed yet.