Toptal Fullstack Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

It's a 5 step interview. 1. HR step - this is super important, if you do well here, the next steps will be way easier. You gotta have fluent English to pass. Practice a quick verbal summary of your career. No tech questions. 2. First algo assignment - 3 topics, 1h 30m. Do it alone on a platform that scores automatically. If you aced the first step, you can pass this even with just 33% points. 3. Zoom interview with live coding. 2 problems, way easier than step 2. 15 mins per problem. Time starts after you read instructions and ask questions. Maybe get 2 extra mins if you solved it but have a small bug. First problem is easier than the second. Topics: sorting, distance, string, implementation. 4. Project assignment - 1 week to finish. Takes about 10 hours. You can do only frontend for frontend jobs, but definitely do the backend too for full-stack roles. Doing backend + frontend + jwt auth + best practices like unit tests, backend search/filter, small bundle size will take 30-40 hours. Then, record a 10 min video explaining the app, functionality, implementation, decisions, etc. Sample project: Todo list app with admin panel, roles, and reports. 5. Code/functionality review on Zoom - about 1 hour.

So the interview process had 4 stages. Each stage had a different interviewer, and they all were friendly with a professional attitude. The first stage was a language and personality assessment. The second one, in my case and for my specialization, was a 120 minutes coding challenge with 3 difficult algorithms. I consider this part the most difficult from the technical point of view. The third interview was a live coding challenge with two more approachable algorithms. I was given 15 minutes to solve each of them. This is also not that simple because 15 minutes is a very short time so you don't really have time to make and correct more than 1 mistake if you don't solve the tasks right away. The last stage was a fullstack project for which I was given two weeks to complete. This was more approachable in my experience because I got to actually use and show the skills I use most in my work. The assessment of the mini project was very thorough, and I actually enjoyed that because I could showcase all my work to someone who really understood the work behind it.

I only did the first part, which was the English test with a recruiter. The meeting started on time. She asked me questions about my background and experience. After less than 10 minutes, she said my English wasn't good enough to move forward. It was really demotivating since I have an Upper Intermediate certification. I think they didn't want to proceed with me because I don't have a lot of work experience.