Quo Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

The interview process for Quo was different, focusing on real-world experience and communication over Leetcode. It had 5 interviews, about 3.5 hours total. It started with a recruiter phone screen, then a technical screen with an engineering manager. The rounds were conversational but had standard questions to make it feel structured. The final round had three interviews: system design, a deep dive technical, and a product/business sense round. The systems round involved designing an electronic voting system for scalability and real-world use. The technical round required discussing a proud-of project, including tech debt decisions and potential changes. The product/business round was about using software to meet business goals and drive growth, and how to evaluate requirements and make decisions based on them. Overall, it was a professional and relevant interview experience, better than generic coding challenges.

I had a great experience interviewing with OpenPhone. The recruiters were super responsive and I felt like they really respected my time. The process involved a recruiter screen, a call with an Engineering Manager, and a pretty straightforward take-home assignment. Then, there was a virtual onsite that spanned two days. This included a review of my take-home, a system design interview that felt more like a collaborative chat than a typical interrogation, a chat with a Product Manager, and finally, a team and culture fit interview. Everyone was really nice, and I left with a very positive impression of the company. OpenPhone's interview process was definitely one of the better ones I've encountered, and I particularly liked that the take-home wasn't overly burdensome.

It started with a recruiter screen and then a hiring manager screen. After that, there was a take-home assessment where I had to build a DB-driven API from scratch and connect it to their API. They said it should take about four hours, but you could spend more time on it if you wanted, and they seemed to like it when people went the extra mile. The virtual on-site consisted of a review of the take-home with some follow-up questions, a chat with a product manager about product sense and managing stakeholders, a systems design interview, and a skip-level interview focusing on behavioral questions. They did give feedback at the end, which was appreciated. However, some of the constructive criticism didn't quite align with our discussion during the review or the constraints they provided. For instance, they mentioned improving code structure and maintainability by separating concerns and using standard practices like linting. This was confusing because I'd deliberately skipped linting to save time, and they'd agreed it wasn't a priority for the exercise. Similar points were raised about debatable aspects like Prisma calls or basic development practices, which I felt were secondary to delivering a functional solution within the time limit. Given my background in improving development practices and hiring engineers, I found their coding assessment didn't accurately gauge candidates, especially when criticizing efforts to adhere to the time limit. On a positive note, everyone I interacted with was very pleasant, and I'd like to give a special shout-out to Kaitlin, a great recruiter who really supported her candidates.