Ro Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

The interview process started with two phone screenings, each lasting about an hour. One was with the recruiter and the other with the hiring manager. After that, I got a take-home test that involved matching drug names to their side effects, which I thought was pretty reasonable. The next part was a bit of a pain, though. They had me meet with at least five different groups of people all in one day. It was a remote role with a fully remote team, so I really don't get why it couldn't have been spread out over a few days. I even had to take a vacation day for it. To top it off, I got rejected, so it was a wasted day off.

The interview process at Ro is pretty standard, similar to what you'd expect in the industry. It kicks off with a recruiter call, followed by a chat with the hiring manager. Then, there's a take-home test, and after that, an on-site interview where you'll meet various team members and people from cross-functional teams. The final stage involves meeting the CTO and co-founders. Everyone I spoke with was really prepared and knew exactly what they were looking for. The interviews felt more like two-way discussions, which I actually enjoyed. They seem to be on the hunt for engineers who have solid fundamentals and deep experience.

First, there was a take-home challenge. Then, a discussion about how I approached it. The team didn't seem very technically strong from our chats. I had a bug in my code and explained why it happened, but no one on the team could help debug it. I ended up resubmitting with a fix. It was a 2-hour coding challenge focused on asynchronous programming. The assignment description said, 'We're not looking for perfect, production-ready code.' Yet, the rejection reason was that my coding standards weren't up to their level. I pointed out areas for improvement, but got no real response. It felt like a waste of time interacting with the team, but at least I got to practice asynchronous programming.