PandaDoc Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

The HR contact was good, very responsive. They sent out a prep doc that was helpful, showing they care about candidates. But, during the culture-fit part, I told them I'm Ukrainian and have trauma from the war, so I needed to avoid Russian nationals. Then, for the system design round, they scheduled a Russian interviewer. This was upsetting and made it hard to focus, affecting my performance. It felt like they ignored my valid concerns.

The whole interview process went really smoothly and was surprisingly quick. In the very beginning had a video call with the hiring manager - both were easy to schedule and they kept me in the loop the whole time. The interviewers knew their stuff and gave me good details about the job and what the company's like. From when I applied to getting an offer was only about two weeks, which was way faster than I'm experienced with other places. Everything just felt really organised and put-together.

So I got to the technical stage of the interview process. It was supposed to be system design and general engineering interviews, each 1.5 hours, and they were scheduled for different days within the same week. I got rejected after the system design one. What's weird is that the recruiter and hiring manager made it sound like the whole tech interview stage was one block, so they scheduled them at the same time. There was no heads-up that failing one part meant you wouldn't do the others. And then, they sent the rejection less than 24 hours before my next tech interview. To top it off, the company had to reschedule the general engineering interview with less than 24 hours' notice because of some emergency on their end. This ended up messing with my schedule, blocking 4.5 hours of my time when we had agreed on 3 hours. The actual interview time was only 30% of what was blocked. They gave feedback for the parts that happened, but they didn't say anything about the communication issues or how the process was set up. My advice to the company is to be super clear about the hiring process, like how it's structured, what depends on what, and what might happen, so people can plan their time better. And for other candidates, definitely ask for this kind of info upfront.