Vercel Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

So we had 5 rounds in total. First was the Hiring Manager Screen, then a Technical Interview, followed by a Frontend Focused Interview, and then System Design. After completing 4 rounds, the recruiter reached out and mentioned an offer was forthcoming. However, the next day, they informed me about a final chat with the CPO. Post-discussion, the feedback was that I lacked sufficient knowledge about Vercel, leading to a rejection.

So the interview was pretty structured, they really wanted to see if I could code and solve problems. There were four parts to it. First, there was an online test with some aptitude and logic stuff, plus two coding problems, one about strings and another a greedy algorithm, done on HackerRank or something similar. Then came two technical interviews. The first one was all about CS basics: data structures like stacks and queues, DBMS normalization and indexing, OOPS concepts with examples, and OS topics like process vs thread and deadlocks. They also had me solve a few coding questions live. The second technical round was more about my projects and system design. I had to explain my 'Campus Shop' project (MERN stack), why I picked that stack, how I did authentication, and the challenges I ran into. Then they hit me with a system design question: designing a notification system. The last part was an HR interview, which was pretty chill, mostly about my communication, motivation, and personality. They asked the usual 'tell me about yourself,' 'why hire you,' 'where do you see yourself in five years,' and 'are you open to relocation?' plus a question about a time I failed and what I learned.

The interview process started with a recruiter call. Then I had a technical screen where I was asked a rate limiter question, and the interviewer was really helpful. The onsite interviews were disorganized. I completed one part of the onsite, which I thought went well, and the interviewer indicated I met the requirements for that session. The instructions for the onsite were confusing; one part of the portal described a typical data structures and algorithms question, but another part, in smaller text, asked for a pre-coded website. I managed to prepare for that just before the interview. However, the second day of interviews was very problematic. My system design interview was rescheduled due to an interviewer's personal emergency. Then, another interview scheduled for the same day was suddenly canceled a few hours before it was supposed to start. Later that day, I received a generic email from the recruiter saying they wouldn't be moving forward. I asked for more details given the time I invested, but received no explanation. I found this very unprofessional. I put a lot of effort into preparing, including setting up my environment for one of the interviews, and for the process to end this way after multiple scheduling issues felt like a waste of my time. I had seen reviews online about Vercel's recruiting process being poor, and I'm disappointed to have experienced it myself.