Qualia Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

The interview process was fair and reasonable. Recruiters were quick to respond and flexible with scheduling. I made it to onsite but wasn't able to complete 1 of the technical rounds. Looks like you need to fully complete all technical rounds to get an offer. To prep for this interview I recommend practicing JS interview problems with a 60 minute timer and speaking outloud as you work through it. You have to be quick to finish the problems in time.

After I scheduled my interview, I read through all the feedback on Glassdoor. I had hoped that people were just upset about not getting an offer, but I found all the feedback on here to be really accurate. Others have stated that some of the problems are building a weather app, completing a snake game, building a piano application, and hacking a website. There are now new problems such as completing a Brick Out game (draw the paddle and ball, animate the ball, do collision detection), and building a stock ticker application (use a given library to search, display, and update stocks). There is nothing complicated about these problems, they seem to just be looking at how fast you can complete them. Every coding exercise has bonus tasks, and you will have to complete all of them to get an offer. The interviewers acted like they did not want to be there. They asked questions to start their rounds, but didn't seem to care what I said, often trying to cut my answer short, and never asking follow-up questions. Every interviewer I had tried to cut their round short, and not give me the full time to ask questions. They were not good at answering questions, and I had one interviewer who would only give a one sentence answer no matter what I asked. Most interviewers did not pay attention to what I was doing. I could hear them typing on their keyboard, and doing other work, as I worked through the problems. Even when I completed the problem, I was just ignored, and the interview continued until the 45 minute timer was up for the problem. I read on here that if they don't like what you did in an interview round, they won't proceed to the next. I kept hoping they would cut off my interview, but they never did. The way they schedule the interview consumes your whole day. There are three technical rounds, and a behavioral round, but they put long "breaks" in between. I assume this is to accomodate their employees with scheduling, but it really wastes the candidate's time. I wish they were up-front about their technology stack, especially having asked the recruiter before the interview. It's disappointing to be going through an interview, and hear everyone talking about working with MeteorJS. None of my interviewers talked about wanting someone who could lead, mentor, or design applications, they just wanted someone who could crank out code with their tech stack. There was not even a design round in the interview. This is not a company I would recommend to anyone.

I applied online and got an email from a recruiter a few weeks later. We scheduled a 30-minute recruiter screen call. After that, I had an hour-long technical screening interview where I had to build a weather app using any web framework. Then there were three more technical interviews and another interview focused on product behavior. The process seemed reasonable, though sometimes it felt like early CS projects. Some other reviews here are pretty accurate about their style. I enjoyed talking to most of the team, but the final behavioral interview felt unorganized, and the interviewer seemed uninterested, maybe they had already made a decision. The interview scheduler was nice and flexible. Overall, the process was interesting, but they seem too picky given the number of technical rounds. Judging people heavily on their ability to complete applications perfectly in 30-45 minutes feels impractical.