Pontera Interview Questions
& Process

HR did the first round, and said they would set up the second with the hiring manager. But I never heard back after following up. I reached out to the hiring manager myself and scheduled the second round. The third round was supposed to be onsite. HR was supposed to schedule it, but again, no response after I followed up. It was awkward since I already had two other offers by this point. It was a very unprofessional experience, which is a shame because the product is good and I felt I was a good fit.

It started with an HR screening call, then a nice Zoom chat with a senior dev. After that, I got a project to build, which they said should take 30 hours, but it was more like a week's worth of work to do well. The worst part was after getting the task; nobody answered my questions about it. I eventually figured it out, and they gave me an extra 6 hours to submit, still no help. For a whole month, I emailed them about the status, got nothing back. Finally, I CC'd another HR person, and then I got a call saying they were too busy to even look at my task. Three days later, HR called again to say they picked someone else, even though they still hadn't reviewed my work. They had issues accessing my Google Drive and wanted to see it anyway to give feedback. The whole experience and how they treated candidates was really bad. Glad I won't work for a company that unprofessional, especially after the good first chat with the senior dev and the crazy deadline.

I had an initial call with an external recruiter, then another call with an internal recruiter. After that, I interviewed with the hiring manager. They weren't with the company long and didn't seem to have much interviewing experience. They cut me off and talked over me a few times. They only let me ask one question, and then they used that to quiz me about my company's business, not my specific job. It was a weird interview, not necessarily bad, but definitely strange. I also don't like when interviewers try to trick you, which I felt was happening here. If you pass this stage, there's an unpaid writing assignment, which I personally think is wrong.

I had an onsite interview for a backend role at Pontera. It was pretty organized and had two main parts: a personal interview and a technical one. The personal part was a quick intro about myself and some questions about my background, what I studied, and why I wanted the job. For the technical part, I had to: give a short presentation on a project I'd done, answer some basic Java questions, and solve a LeetCode-style algorithm problem. There was also a multi-threaded code problem where I had to spot synchronization issues. I got the first algorithm question done pretty fast. The synchronization one took me a bit longer to figure out, but I eventually got the right answer. But, they said I didn't move on because it took me too long to solve that last problem. It was a professional experience overall, and the interviewers were nice and gave me some hints when I needed them.