RichRelevance Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

So basically, my whole experience was a waste of time because the company was really unprofessional. It took about 5 weeks from applying to the onsite. I first talked to HR, who was nice. Then a phone screen with a principal engineer. Then I went onsite, met him and 3 other people, and had lunch. A few days later, HR said they wanted me to talk to two more people over the phone, one was a VP who was supposed to be there in person but wasn't. They said the second interview would be another technical chat. But the day before those calls, the VP was still not available, so they decided to make their decision based on one final phone call. This last call was not what I expected at all. Instead of talking to someone who knew my situation and was prepared for a final interview, I got a combative engineer. He was surprised I'd already been onsite, thinking it was an initial screen. He argued about my word choices, like what a distributed system is, and struggled with my coding solution because he couldn't read code well. He just didn't seem to care. After waiting a couple days, I emailed HR, then the principal engineer, then called HR again, but heard nothing back.

I first got a call from HR about my skills and resume technologies like Hadoop, MapReduce, etc. Then, a Senior Software engineer called me for a telephonic interview covering basic Algorithms, data structures (like detecting loop in link list), and jQuery concepts (selectors, selecting elements by attributes) since I had some UI experience. My third interview was also a phone call with a very senior engineer where I had to code to find unique words in a string and their count. I got good news the following week. The whole interview process was quite smooth and quick for me.

The interviewer really emphasized that a fully working solution was key, more so than the exact way it was built. I got stuck on one section, and even though I explained my thinking step-by-step, the interviewer didn't offer any hints. This was my first time doing a technical phone screen.