I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Carousell (Singapore) in Apr 2017
Interview
It took around 2 weeks in total.
1. Phone screen with the recruiter,
2. A list of questions including culture and tech to be finished at home.
3. A homework project
4. Batch interview. 1st round tech interview with 3 lead engineer, 2nd round with another 2 lead engineer. 3rd round with all 3 co-founders.
I spent quite a lot of time on the interview: 3 hours to finish the questions list which including a design questions in it, but they never asked or discussed it during the interview.
And the whole weekends on finish the project they sent me.
I cleared all the questions during the interview, but rejected because they suspect that there's a 3rd util function used in my project is copied from somewhere in the github. The function is even not required of the project, in other words, the project can be ran perfectly without this function.
I felt insulted when they told me the reason of rejection.
The chat with co-founders all pleased and you can feel the passion and ambition from them even though they are young guys.
But I think the applicant for the backend engineer should seriously consider about it if you got the offer from them.
I applied online. I interviewed at Carousell (Taipei) in Apr 2021
Interview
1 coding test (2 questions easy to medium)
1 pair programming
1 system design
1 PM round
1 Hiring Manager round
1 Director round
1 Co-Founder round
Most of the interview process went fine. The problem is co-founder did seem to show any interest when you talked, and it really got me there, caused a lot of pressure and made me think all the good news or reviews are just good PR work.
And the reason to reject me is that "the team has a higher expectation on this role at technical level", but the ironic part is that in the system design round, the interviewer was very pleased with my reasoning and told me directly that he thought it went really well.
Thank you so much for taking the time to share your interview experience. This is very valuable and allows us to refine and improve the process as we grow. Means a lot to me and the hiring manager. We apologise if it seemed that we did not show interest and our rejection can be better. It is definitely not what we intended to do. We will be more mindful of how we conduct ourselve more moving foward.
Marcus, Co-founder