TubeMogul Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

I had an interview at my university campus since it was close by, and then I had an on-site interview. The first one was easy, and the second one was also pretty easy. It was a 3 hour process with 3 interviewers. The questions were simple, but I messed up a bit because it was my first interview as a freshman. The office was nice, and the people I met were okay too.

I first reached out to TubeMogul in April about a summer software engineering internship, but they were already full. I reconnected with them at my university's career fair in September, meeting the same recruiter from April, and got invited to an on-campus interview. That interview was 30 minutes, where I had to analyze a PHP code snippet and discuss MVC design. A week later, I had an on-site interview that lasted 3 hours with 4 people. The first person asked general programming questions like code analysis, OOP, DB queries, and writing functions. The second person focused on front-end web dev topics such as javascript, CSS, and jQuery. The last two people didn't ask technical questions, just assessed cultural fit.

I got referred by someone who works here. The recruiter reached out and set up a screening interview. After that, I had a technical phone interview with the Director of Engineering. It was a 30-minute interview where I was asked about Java, Spring, and my past projects. I answered everything, and he told me about his team. I didn't hear back for a week, so I emailed the recruiter. He said the position was filled, but the interviewer gave good feedback. So, the recruiter offered me a job on a different team and asked me to come in for 4 technical interviews at their office. At the onsite, four engineers from an engineering team interviewed me. The first round was with a software engineer and one of his colleagues, which was unexpected. He asked about a project on my resume, then asked me to reverse a singly linked list and write an SQL query. I used a different approach for the query that he didn't expect, and we debated it a bit before I convinced him. He then asked how I'd write the tables for the query in Java, with follow-up questions. This interview went over by 15 minutes. The second interview started late because the first one ran long. The interviewer immediately went to the whiteboard with a vague problem: sort a lot of unsorted messages. I made an assumption to start, which he agreed with, but then he just kept confusing me with a lot of discussion. Right after that, the third interviewer came and asked if I had any questions, otherwise, we'd solve a problem. No break given. He asked me to design an elevator system. The last round was with the director, who asked system design questions. He had me draw the architecture of a project from my resume and then asked me to scale it, covering topics like load balancers, sharding, caching, NoSQL vs SQL, and replication. I think I did well. He finished by asking 4-5 behavioral questions, and he was friendly.