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YOE: 16 years. Result: Rejected. Overall Opinion about the process: Decent. Min. Requirement: Daily Leetcode for a month + one weekend for the take-home. Recently I have attended Cloud Kitchens Onsite (via zoom) want to share my experience. Since I have signed the NDA, I can't share the exact questions, but the interview process might help others. Also, please DM me if your team/company is hiring and open for remote international candidates for principal software roles. A Recruiter contacted me on LinkedIn. I did some research on glassdoor & blind, signed NDA, and attended the call with her. She explained about the company and some of the projects they are currently working on. Based on glassdoor comments, I asked some tough questions like - why she contacted me and did she find any relevance with my profile for the opening they are looking for. She did perfect homework - she mentioned the grad school I have attended. I am working for a US company remotely from India for the last 12 years; I am a foundational engineer for the product I am working on. I am satisfied with her explanation and accepted to proceed further with the hiring process. She gave a take-home challenge and asked to submit it within a week. After going through the take-home challenge, I have sent her an email asking her ten questions about the questions, assumptions, etc. I got answers after three days for all the questions. I have spent a weekend and coded the take-home challenge. I have coded my own versions of Heap & Kinetic Heap (a cool DS which I found while trying to solve this challenge) and built the models & systems on top of these. This helped me to revise a lot of basics for interview preparation. Along with the readme, I have submitted videos of solution architecture explained on whiteboard + code walkthrough addressing the evaluator. Overall I have spent 16 hours on this take-home. I have submitted the solution within time and got a reply from the recruiter in 3 days saying that they have accepted the solution and want to proceed. The first recruiter handed me to another recruiter. So I have signed another NDA before setting up the next call. In this call, she explained the four onsite rounds and what is expected out of each round. She asked me to pick three dates & times. Since I am in India, I had to schedule interviews during my night time. I have decided to do it all in one day (8.30 PM to 1.30 AM). I gave three dates. They have confirmed the earliest among them within one day. I have reviewed Dynamic Programming, Multi-Threading and practiced some mock tests on Leetcode. Here is the summary of the four rounds. 1. Algorithms & CS Basics: After a basic introduction, LC (very) Hard level problem is asked. Recruiter mentioned that coding is not necessary for this round. I have given brute force solutions and improved them with heaps. I realized that in one of the cases, it is not optimal. I moved to a Binary search realized that another case was missing. I tried to optimize the solution multiple times. Probably at the end, I mentioned unless there is a treap (BST + Heap), this can't be further optimized. I think that is the solution they are looking for. I couldn’t explain the further since my 2nd round interviewer joined. I think I performed average in this round. 2. In this round, the person who has evaluated my take-home challenge did further deep drive. He has reviewed my code thoroughly and came prepared with notes. He knows the exact points where my code won’t behave correctly. I have explained some of the choices I made and how those issues can be fixed. I liked his attention to detail because I have evaluated a lot of take-home challenges in my job, but probably I have never remembered a solution as he did. In the end, he mentioned my solution as good. I think this round went well. 3. Coding round. The recruiter mentioned that my code will be evaluated on code output in this round and how I write compilable code. I think I made the mistake of not driving the interview for the measured parameter. I was given a problem (LC Medium range) and asked to define the data structure. Only after he is satisfied with that, he mentioned the algorithm’s question to achieve a result. I have already spent a good 40 min on data structure, example object, algorithm, and its merits, etc. I had to rush through the code in the last 15 - 20 min. I was not sure if I will be able to complete the code, so I have started speaking out why I am writing something while writing code. In the last 5 min, I was given a test case but couldn't get the output. Even though the logic is correct, I am a good 5 min away from the output. I have requested for extra 10 min but was denied due to a tight schedule. I think I lost in this round because I am well aware that this is coding output round and should have driven it towards writing code instead of spending too much time perfecting the ds and algorithm. The problem is not very tough like 1st round. I would have got output if I had started coding 10 min before. 4. System design round. This is very interesting round because instead of asking me to design a system, they asked me to pick one exciting project I did recently and did a deep dive into it. I have given four projects list (2 from day job + 2 from personal) and presented a one-minute pitch on everything. He picked up the first, and we discussed that project. He asked many interesting questions about understanding the functionality, why something is done like that, and what can be improved further. I round I felt like 50 min completed in 5 - 10 min. Since the project is something I am working from the last five years in my company, I explained all the questions. I am not sure how this round went. But I consider this as decent. So overall, two decent rounds + 1 avg round + 1 lousy round. The recruiter replied after 10 days that I am rejected. Please DM me if your team/company is hiring and open for remote international candidates for principal software roles. #cloudkitchens #interviewquestions #referral #onsite
Damn. This sounds incredible and your experience seems really valuable to companies. Thankd for taking the time to write out all this. Gives a good glimpse of how rigorous these interviews can be.
Did you give Onsite?
From your anecdote, my impression that you want to achieve a perfect result on each step. This is not bad, but most startups are looking for move fast, fail soon
Did you give Onsite?
Wow thanks for sharing the process! Good luck!
DM for MS with preffered job ids
I can help with the LinkedIn referral. You can email me with this info: up to 3 desired job postings, your resume, your LinkedIn profile and a third-person intro of yourself. My email: linkedinreferrals@gmail.com (Other folks are also welcome if interested. But note that I cannot refer new grads, interns, non-engineering or non-US positions)
Hey, thanks for this writeup. For #1 Algorithms & CS Basics, did you write full working code or just pseudo code?
Did you give the Onsite interview?
@Op I'm thinking of interviewing with them. Can I DM you?
Yes, if they have offered me in ML team. Would have passed on if they offered in integrations team. As per my understanding they are trying to integrate all possible food delivery systems into theirs.
Frankly, I didn't know much about their internal team's. So I wouldn't say I didn't like their integrations team. I was looking to move towards ML and thought a growing startup like theirs would have good enough challenges/problems to solve. So more on me than their team.