Trulia Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

So I gave them my resume at a college career fair, and then they emailed me and invited me to one of two group interviews they were having at their office the next week. When I went, there were like twenty other people there, also from college career fairs. A bunch of the company's employees, like the VP of Engineering, were there to meet us and run the interview. They said they weren't really looking at our programming skills (maybe they already did that from our resumes?), but they wanted to see how we worked in teams and what ideas we had for the company. They split us into groups of four and gave us about two hours to come up with ideas to make their products better or grow their customer base or make more money. Then we had to present our ideas. More employees came to listen and ask us some basic questions about our ideas and how we'd execute them. A few days later, a recruiter called to ask how I thought the interview went and what I thought about my teammates, and then they emailed those of us they weren't moving forward with. Since this was Trulia's first time hiring interns, the process might be different now.

The process was pretty standard if you've done the interview circuit at a Silicon Valley tech company. It kicked off with a recruiter call, then a phone screen with a lead engineer, followed by a coding challenge which was pretty enjoyable. The onsite interview involved meeting with three engineers, the team lead, and a project manager. The whole thing wrapped up in about two weeks.

The interview process was pretty straightforward. It started with a 30-minute phone screen, followed by a two-and-a-half-hour in-person interview. This in-person part had 3 segments, each 45 minutes long: front-end, back-end, and a semi-technical chat with the hiring manager. For the Front End questions, they really focused on javascript knowledge, while the Back End questions leaned towards PHP. Having a general and broad knowledge of the language and its features would be very helpful for both.