Xcalar Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

Applied on the website, then I had an online assessment. After submitting that, a recruiter reached out. The first round was a chat with the hiring manager about the company and its culture. Following that, there was a one-hour technical screen with an engineer. Since I'm not local to the Bay Area, the next two rounds were both two-hour technical screens. In each of those, I worked through 1-2 technical questions with an engineer for the hour. The whole process was pretty positive; interviewers provided guidance when I got stuck, making it feel more like pair programming than solving problems alone. The technical questions involved string parsing, binary trees, and DFS/BFS. It seems like you'd be fine if you can handle medium-difficulty problems on Hackerrank/Leetcode. The recruiter was also responsive, providing updates shortly after my interviews.

I applied online, they sent me a OA, finished the OA on hackerrank then followed by a phone interview, didn't pass though, maybe 2 phone interview + 1 onsite interview.

I submitted my resume at a career fair, and the very next day, I got an email scheduling an interview for the following day. The first interview, a one-on-one, was pretty standard. About a week later, I was notified about a second round. This second interview was quite strange; it was held in a hotel conference room in my city, so I didn't have to travel. Multiple candidates were being interviewed simultaneously at a single long table in the same room, which felt uncomfortably cramped. It appeared most of the company's staff were present, busy with candidates. I was interviewed by the CEO and a software engineer. They seemed unprepared, as they appeared to be looking at my resume for the first time. They asked some questions, then the CEO launched into a lengthy presentation about the company's supposed innovation. I couldn't get a clear technical explanation of their product. Instead, I heard odd claims like, 'We're developing a distributed micro-kernel,' which sounded nonsensical given the situation. The CEO also boasted about his industry connections and mentioned the company had access to the source code of a major proprietary infrastructure software. He explicitly stated, 'At Xcalar we don't believe in open source.' At that point, I knew this wasn't the right place for me. I received a generous offer, which I declined. I suspect the company might be interesting for those focused on systems and who are against open source.