Aha! Sr. Software Engineer interview questions

The interview process was pretty short, and they were good about scheduling the next interview right after the previous one if things went well. It was 3 interviews in total after the initial recruiter call -- they were hour long chats with a tech lead, the director of engineering, and the CTO/co-founder. They were basically just conversations about your previous experience while diving into technical detail on them. The first one also included a little system design for a popular music app, but it was all verbal (describing relations among the entities, how would you add this feature, etc.). The second one involved looking at some Ruby code and going over how you'd implement a couple of methods given the existing setup. In the last chat, the CTO really dug into fundamentals, especially around knowing how databases work. How are indexes used, what is the underlying data structure, and even deeper on some stuff that stumped me. Then he asked some questions around React and Redux. I felt pretty good about the CTO chat, and we even talked about salary expectations at the end, but the recruiter called me the next business day and told me they weren't moving forward, which was a bummer. I'd gone through some other interview processes with typical Leetcode questions, but I enjoyed the conversational nature of these interviews, and I enjoyed talking with everyone. They all seemed like smart people that would be fun to work with. My feedback was that they wanted someone with more Ruby/Rails experience, which I found odd. I was up front that I only had 2 years of experience with it (but several years in other frameworks), and we didn't discuss much about it, except going into how I'd look into a performance issue with a Rails endpoint. I mentioned looking into monitoring around it, using a debugger to step through the endpoint, etc., but didn't initially mention the obvious around checking the logs (something I do all the time lol). I guess that was enough to not move forward despite everything else.

The first interview was with a tech lead. The second was with the director. And the third one with the CTO. Overall, I enjoyed the interview. It was all conversational, with a bit of emphasis on computer science fundamentals. The CTO is a really cool dude; he asked good thought-provoking questions. Even though I did not do that well in the interview with the CTO, I still very much enjoyed the conversation. My only advice is to have a better interviewee tracking process. I showed up for two interviews and nobody was there. One was canceled because the person was sick, as I found out later; the other one was accidentally set an hour later than what I was told. Not a big deal, but would be nice if the company implemented a better system for tracking interviews. Overall, I would not care about the small deficiencies of the interview process if I got an offer. It sounds like a really cool company to work for.