Paxos Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

The interview process here is pretty wild. It starts with a recruiter call, then a hiring manager screen, followed by a coding interview. After that, there's a virtual onsite which includes coding, system design, and behavioral questions. If you get through that, you have a 30-minute CTO call. Finally, there's a call with the CEO who can reject you for seemingly no reason, even if everyone else thinks you're a good hire. I actually liked talking to the engineers and other interviewers, those chats were good. But after weeks and multiple rounds where I did well, the CEO just said no. No real feedback or logical explanation, just a rejection after I put in hours of work. The recruiter was also basically MIA, making it hard to get timely responses or updates, which just makes the whole drawn-out process worse. Other reviews suggest this happens a lot, with the CEO rejecting people arbitrarily after they've gone through the whole process. It feels like a pattern and it's disrespectful to waste candidates' time like this. Seven or more rounds just for the CEO to veto everything on a whim is insulting. This company doesn't value candidates' time at all. Better to look elsewhere.

Got a ping from a recruiter for this role. First up was a 30-min intro chat with an Engineering Manager, followed by a 1.5-hour live coding session with two engineers. The virtual onsite included another 1-hour live coding session with two engineers, a 1-hour discussion about past projects, and a 45-min behavioural interview. There was a 1-hour system design interview planned for the next day. Both live coding sessions involved medium-level questions on platforms like LeetCode or HackerRank. The coding interviews went great; the interviewers were friendly and open to discussing the role and company. However, the past projects interview was a different story. The interviewer was unhappy because I wouldn't share the deep-level design of my current project due to my contract and NDA, only describing the high-level architecture and components. This wasn't sufficient for him. After that, I was ghosted by the Paxos recruiter, and the next day's interview was cancelled without any notification. Two weeks later, my recruiter informed me I didn't get the job. Pretty unprofessional experience overall.

The interview process was really smooth and overall pleasant experience. I was referred to the company by a current employee and within a few days someone reached out to me to set up the initial phone screening. The phone screening was pretty brief but they were friendly friendly and the purpose was really just to see if you are a fit for the company before proceeding. After the phone screening a recruiter reached out to me to set up a video interview. The recruiter was very responsive and helpful and generally had a really quick response time. The video interview was with an engineer from the company and asked a standard data-structure/algorithm type of question. The interviewer was really great! He really knew how to make me feel at ease so that I could perform my best and had a great balance of letting me work things out on my own, but being able to guide me if I got stuck so that they could accurately evaluate my skills. The recruiter then followed up with me that same day to schedule the onsite interview. However, I was unable to make it to the scheduled on-site interview and then received an offer from a different company that required an answer, so I did not end up continuing with Paxos.