I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at KOHO (Toronto, ON) in Mar 2022
Interview
I was reached by a recruiter over email. The interview process consists of three 4 parts.
1 - Initial screaming from HR over the phone
2 - Take-home assignment with a real-world case from KOHO to be complete in 5 days
3 - System design and pair programming with two random engineers with Excalidraw and Visual Studio Code (you need to authenticate on VS)
4 - Behavioral interview
Although at first glance the interview process seems pretty fair and straightforward, it is totally nonsense and unfair. They ask you to create a production-like application for parsing and validating a file with multiple transactions. I spent over 20hs creating a microservice using SOLID and DDD with 27 unit tests and APIs deployed on a public cloud provider so anyone could test it out. I also created extensive documentation using both readme.md and Swagger web pages.
Usually, when companies ask candidates to do take-home assignments, they expect them to discuss their approach and solution over the interview, and KOHO chains that they follow this approach. However, this is not the case. My second interview was with two random engineers which did now know about my take-home assignment at all, the one I spent 20hs on. To add to that, most of the system design interview is spent testing your ability of programming in Go, which was not mentioned during the process since they claim they were tech agnostic and did not require experience with Go.
To sum up, do not waste your time if they ask you do to any take-home challenge since no one, absolutely no one, will see your submission (apart from the HR). Also, make sure your know Go pretty well if applying for KAHO.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Create a random API with no domain on a fairly complex microservice in Go with very poor documentation under a couple of minutes. Bear in mind this so claimed "microservice" does not follow any modern design patterns.
I applied through other source. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at KOHO (Toronto, ON) in Nov 2021
Interview
Step 1: Half an hour HR call.
Step 2: Online test.
Step 3: 1.5 hr long technical interview.
Step 4: 1h long cultural interview.
Step 5: Team fit.
Reached out to a recruiter from LinkedIn and he got back to me in minutes and set up the initial interview instantly. After an half an hour long initial HR screen, the HR sent out a coding assignment from Codility which I needed to finish in two weeks. They were really flexible with the timing.
After submitting the coding test, the HR reached out to me again in half an hour to schedule the next round which consist of a technical deep-dive session and designing one piece of Koho's system. They were really open-ended and the interviewers were really friendly and was guiding me to the right path.
After the technical interview, the HR reached out to me again in less than an hour to schedule the next round which was the cultural round. It was consisted of some behavioral questions based on Koho's principles.
After that, it was the team fit and offer.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The coding test was consisted of the following:
1 - A very easy coding question.
2 - A complex SQL Select question. You would need to break the down the problem into smaller pieces to reach the final result.
3 - Finish coding an API that queries data from AWS. You would need to let the unit test guide you.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at KOHO (Toronto, ON) in Nov 2021
Interview
I did several interviews in the past 60 days, and KOHO was the only one, in my option, that have a decent interview process.
It's composed of an online 3 questions Codility like challenge, system design interview, culture, and finally the Engineering Manager talk.
If I could change anything about the interview, I would get rid of one step, because, in the end you are like: seriously, there are more steps?
Overall I would give a 9 to the interview process.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
You have 3 hours to:
1 - Solve a simple algorithm
2 - Solve a fairly complex SQL Select, but if you have solid SQL knowledge you shouldn't have any problems with it.
3 - You have to finish coding an API that queries data from AWS