TRM Labs Interview Questions
& Process

I had a screening call, then a one-on-one with the hiring manager, followed by several technical rounds. They indicated an offer was coming and gave me a compensation range. I told them it was great, but I was still interviewing elsewhere and needed time to consider. Later that day, they rescinded the offer. The recruiter offered an explanation but never followed up. The ending wasn't great, but it seems like a good company otherwise.

A recruiter reached out to me about a position. After I said I was interested, I set up an interview with another recruiter about a week later. However, the second recruiter then emailed me the day of the interview to cancel it, without a good reason. They didn't cancel the Calendly invite, though. I got a Calendly reminder about 2 hours before the interview, so I thought it was still happening. I didn't want to be rude or miss out on a chance. I get that jobs and what they need can change, but the recruiter should have been more professional and canceled the invite too, so nobody's time would be wasted.

I applied to a Data Engineer position at TRM Labs and got an email about a week later. The recruiter set up a screener call for the next day. Then, I had a chat with an engineer the day after that about technical details of the work, which I'm calling a technical screener. I scheduled the first round of actual technical interviews for two to three weeks later. This round involved a code review and a system design problem, both specific to TRM's work. I was a bit surprised by the system design question, expecting a broader scope like 'design Twitter', but it was more focused. It caught me off guard a bit, but I managed to answer. Doing a system design visually was a bit tricky. Everyone I interacted with, including recruiters and interviewers, was polite and professional. The main recruiter followed up the day after my technical interviews. While the role wasn't the right fit for me in the end, TRM Labs seemed like a great place with nice people and a good culture.

Had some meet-and-greets with managers to see if I'd be a good fit for the team. Then I had a take-home design project about slicing and dicing blockchain data, followed by a presentation to a panel of 4-5 data engineers. I put a lot of time into the take-home project, figuring out the data store and even making a demo. The project prompt had some issues though, with typos and unclear requirements. I got some answers to my questions, but not all of them. The prompt said it should take 2-4 hours, but it took me longer because of the problems. During the presentation, the panel asked about things that were already excluded in the prompt, and they couldn't clarify my assumptions. I talked about the trade-offs of my design, like handling data cardinality. After the presentation, I got rejected. The recruiter offered feedback, which was nice, but some of it didn't seem right and made me think the panel didn't read the prompt carefully. They said I didn't cover the cardinality issue, even though I spent a good chunk of time on it. The recruiter said they'd look into it but never got back to me. Overall, the hiring process felt unpolished and unfair.