Full-Stack Engineer Interview Experience
I thought they meant a technical decomposition interview, and then I got there and they were like, oh no, we’re actually talking about product. I was basically ad libbing for 45 minutes, trying to mentally adjust in real time.
Interview process
I got in through a referral for a front-end leaning generalist engineering role, and the whole process was way more streamlined than most engineering loops I've done. It was a recruiter screen, a LeetCode-style Python round, a practical front-end debugging round in a small React app, and then a final decomposition interview that turned out to be much more product-focused than I expected. The interviewers were generally engaged, friendly, and professional, and the recruiter was especially responsive, but the final round felt awkward because I never really knew what they wanted from me. What stood out most was how short the process was and the fact that there was no system design at all. They seem to expect their engineers to have real product sense, not just coding skills.
- Recruiter screen
- Technical interview
- Final round
Interview tips
I’d go in expecting a weirdly short process and not assume “decomposition” means technical decomposition. If I were doing it again, I’d explicitly ask what kind of decomposition they mean so I can get in the right headspace before the call. I’d also be ready to talk through product ideas and roadmap tradeoffs out loud without relying on a whiteboard, because that final round felt way more PM-ish than a normal SWE interview. For the coding side, the practical front-end round was totally manageable if you’re comfortable reading a small React app and debugging live.
Company culture
They look like they’re hiring in a very streamlined, low-bureaucracy way. The process was only a few hours of actual interviewing, there was no system design, and the recruiter was very clear and accurate about what was coming. The interviewers themselves felt professional and engaged, and in two rounds there was also a shadow interviewer sitting in. The unusual part is that they seem to expect engineers to cover product thinking too. I was told they don’t have PMs, and that made the product-heavy final round make more sense after the fact, even though I wish they’d framed it more explicitly up front.
Questions asked
Overview
The final round was the weird one. They called it a decomposition interview, and I went in expecting technical decomposition, but it turned out to be much more product-y. It was just one hour, mostly verbal, and I never really got a clear signal on whether they wanted technical thinking, roadmap thinking, or both.
Question types asked
Specific questions asked
Do you want to talk about the task list view?
Do you maybe want to talk about the transcription view?
What do you think about authentication?
What do you think about roles?
I was pretty caught off guard because I expected a technical discussion and suddenly had to do roadmap thinking out loud with no whiteboard. I pulled up their website in real time to refresh myself on the product, then started riffing on areas like the task list view, transcription view, auth, and roles. The hard part was the interviewers gave very short prompts and not much reaction, so I'd talk for a couple minutes, stop, and get the sense they wanted more. I was basically ad-libbing the whole time and trying to infer what they actually cared about.
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