At the end of June, during the interview process, HR asked whether to choose online assessment or an in-person interview. Without much thought, I chose the online assessment.
About a week later, I received an invitation for an onsite interview. Since I was interviewing for a frontend position, all the preparation I did on distributed system knowledge turned out to be irrelevant.
- The first round was with the hiring manager (HM), who introduced their team due to a conflict, which moved this round to the beginning. It was mainly an introduction to their team.
- The interview covered API and system design. I was asked to design an iPhone contact list, which felt like a mix of API and system design. I covered both aspects in the follow-up questions. Additionally, there were some questions related to productionizing.
- I was asked to enhance the functionality of a Photo Carousel by adding paging buttons, fixing data retrieval issues, implementing throttling, and discussing frontend optimization.
- The Engineering Manager (EM) asked me behavioral questions for a whole hour, which felt like an interrogation.
I personally felt that the interview went well, but the next day I received a rejection email. HR wanted to debrief with me, but I didn’t bother responding. Overall, I had a positive experience and felt that the work-life balance (WLB) at the company seemed good.