Senior Software Engineer Interview Experience

I cold applied and heard back within a few weeks, then my very first call was a founder chat instead of a recruiter. After that, the whole process was basically real engineering work: first building a feature on an older branch of their actual codebase, then extending it into a service endpoint, and then doing a system design round that was half architecture critique and half new feature design. They let me choose between doing the coding work onsite in a day or spreading it across a week, and they even gave me a Slack channel for requirement clarification, which made it feel way more like the real job than most interviews do. I got an offer in the end, but I took a different job. Out of all the AI company interviews I did, this was one of the few where I felt like I could actually show how I work instead of how well I can grind LeetCode.

I cold applied and heard back within a few weeks, then my very first call was a founder chat instead of a recruiter. After that, the whole process was basically real engineering work: first building a feature on an older branch of their actual codebase, then extending it into a service endpoint, and then doing a system design round that was half architecture critique and half new feature design. They let me choose between doing the coding work onsite in a day or spreading it across a week, and they even gave me a Slack channel for requirement clarification, which made it feel way more like the real job than most interviews do. I got an offer in the end, but I took a different job. Out of all the AI company interviews I did, this was one of the few where I felt like I could actually show how I work instead of how well I can grind LeetCode.