"The process was quick and well organized. A recruiter reached out, we had a 30-minute intro call, and within a day I was invited to a 45-minute technical Zoom with a backend engineer. I heard back with a decision a few days later, so the whole thing took under two weeks.
The technical round had three parts: about 20 minutes of system design (“what happens when you click Like on Spotify,” followed by a data-modeling question on users, songs and their relationship), a short live-coding problem (find the first duplicate in an array), and a few behavioral questions (a time you received feedback, and the challenges of moving from a large company to a startup).
What went well: Scheduling and communication were smooth, and the recruiter answered my question about the interview format right away. The interviewer was friendly and collaborative. The design discussion was a real conversation rather than a quiz; I clarified the use cases first, walked through an event-driven design with Kafka fan-out, and talked through storage trade-offs. I solved the coding problem with an optimal O(n) approach after confirming my plan with the interviewer.
What didn’t go well: The recruiter said the coding portion would be practical rather than LeetCode-style, but the problem was a classic algorithm question, so the prep guidance didn’t match the actual round. With design, coding and behavioral all packed into 45 minutes, each section felt rushed, and there wasn’t much time to go deep on any of them. On my side, my behavioral answer about feedback came out less structured than I wanted. The rejection was a templated email citing a “different technical profile,” with no specific feedback, so it was hard to know what to improve."
Software Engineer · Senior / L5
