SendGrid Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

The recruiter called first and after a brief intro chat over the phone, they wanted to set up an onsite interview. I went to the Anaheim office and met two people who interviewed me. The first interview was mostly general questions like 'do you know this?' and 'do you know that?' along with a simple programming problem where I had to write code on the board - it was binary search on an array. The second interview had another simple programming question for the board and a database design task using ER diagrams. The feedback process was a bit slow; even though they said I'd hear back in 2 days, it actually took them 10 days. I had to send three emails asking about the decision, and each time they replied, 'sorry, it will be finalized within 2 days.'

The interview process has 4 steps. First, a recruiter call. Then, a hiring manager chat about my projects, tech background and a small coding problem. After passing that, there's an online coding challenge. The last step is the onsite interview, which consists of 4 rounds: Hiring manager interview, Cultural fit interview, Coding interview (they said it wasn't complex, but I struggled with timing even with hints), and a Design interview (covering distributed caching, consistent hashing, and AWS). Overall, it was a positive experience, the interviewers were friendly and helpful, and the questions weren't too tough. A suggestion for improvement would be to offer feedback or a response after the interview, even if it's just a few days later.

I went through the HR screening and then had a technical interview with a senior engineer. They asked general design pattern questions like "what is polymorphism" and then had me implement a binary search in a shared text editor. This seemed odd given the job listed PHP and didn't mention needing to implement basic functions like this. It would have been better as a pre-interview exercise. I don't like solving hard problems under pressure, so I ended the interview. Asking role-irrelevant questions is bad practice; they should test relevant knowledge instead of what a candidate doesn't know. Many good programmers are better at applying knowledge than explaining it or working quickly.