Stride Consulting Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

The interview had a few parts: a take-home coding challenge that was pretty simple and you could use any language, a casual lunch with a Stride engineer to chat about the company and day-to-day work, and then an all-day onsite. The onsite started with a recruiter chat, followed by a 2-hour pair programming session. After that, there were four 20-minute sessions with short breaks, where we went over the take-home exercise more. Then lunch with an employee, a chat with the President, and finally a chat with the COO. The cool thing is, if you get through all this, you might get an offer the same day.

I applied on AngelList. The interview process started with a phone screen followed by a coding challenge. There were supposed to be two more steps: a coffee chat with a developer and a technical on-site, but I accepted another job offer because the scheduling was incredibly slow. It took almost a month to set up the initial phone screen and then another 2-3 weeks to get feedback on the coding challenge. I had to chase them quite a bit. On the plus side, the recruiter was really nice, and the coding challenge itself was fun and came with great, detailed feedback on how to improve my object-oriented coding. However, the delays at every stage were a major downside. They were very slow to respond to emails, if they responded at all. The phone screen scheduling involved a month of missed emails and rescheduled calls. After I submitted the coding challenge, which was a significant effort, I waited 2-3 weeks for a response, which felt disrespectful. I took another job during this waiting period but still followed up with Stride to get their feedback on the coding challenge. It's important to reiterate that there were still two more stages before a potential offer. They really need to improve their recruitment process, whether it's a person or a process issue. They seem to be targeting experienced mid-to-senior engineers with specific skills, but developers at that level won't tolerate such slow response times and delays. They will likely find other jobs before Stride finishes their process, just like I did. My advice to engineers is to not waste your time.

So I had this interview process, right? It started with a screening, then I talked to the hiring manager, and after that, I had some panel interviews. They asked me a bunch of software design questions and also gave me a LeetCode challenge, which I totally aced. The coding part went smoothly and I felt good about my answers. But then, out of nowhere, they told me they went with someone else. Kinda caught me off guard, honestly.