WHOOP Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

HR reached out via email to schedule a call. They asked about my previous experience, my tech stack, whether I'm open to hybrid work, my visa status, and my desired salary. It was a pretty straightforward initial HR screening.

The interview process was mostly smooth with polite interviewers. There were four rounds: Coding/Pseudocode, System Design, Refactoring Legacy Code, and a Behavioral Interview. I felt the evaluation followed a strict pattern, negatively impacting candidates whose answers deviated. For instance, in system design, alternative valid solutions weren't well-received if they differed from the expected approach. Sometimes, junior engineers led discussions with senior candidates, making it feel less collaborative. There was a strong focus on minor details like datatype mismatches or missing validations, overshadowing problem-solving and modern practices. In today's AI era, more emphasis could be placed on architectural thinking, design trade-offs, and engineering judgment. The system design round, in particular, heavily favored one solution, limiting exploration of other reasonable designs. While organized and professional, the evaluation criteria seemed rigid and based on a predefined script rather than encouraging broad technical discussion. I hope they consider the overall picture and don't reject candidates for minor issues, as my recruiter feedback indicated rejection due to these minor things I didn't catch.

I think there's a lot of good things here but some of the people just seem off. I really like that they don't rely on leetcode at all. In my initial screening with the recruiter, I asked her what her favorite aspect of working at WHOOP was, and she literally said "It's inclusive, it's mission driven, and easy to get involved." That's it....it sounds like she doesn't like it there haha. Literally reading off the website. After the screening I had an initial call with a hiring manager where I drew up a high level diagram of one of my work projects, and answered follow up questions. I enjoyed this round the most. After that there was a code session where I was given a lot of Python code, and worked with the interviewers to refactor it. One of the interviewers didn't even talk and seemed to be doing something else the whole hour. And the other interviewer was alright, not mean but not very nice either. I didn't make it past this round, but there was a 3 hour panel to be had after if I did. This seems like an interesting company to work for in terms of technical growth but I didn't get the vibe that they assessed for cultural fit at all.