I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Kustomer (New York, NY) in Nov 2020
Interview
The process took about 2 months. First-round with the recruiter, a regular routine recruiter call. Talked about the company, salary expectations, my background etc.. The technical round was an hour with the engineering manager. The system design was an hour with two engineers; A Principal engineer and a senior software engineer. The last round was divided into two sections; talk with the VP of engineering and talk with the engineering manager about the company, some behavioral questions, my goals, and what I am looking for on my next career move. The interview process was nice and I did enjoy talking to everybody. During the System design interview, I planned to use SQS and lambda function. Therefore I was describing the process of Lambda function that can handle SQS batch records, and one of the engineers disagreed with the idea that lambda functions can handle batch records. I disagreed but he sounded very set in his ways so I just let it go…
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
- Write an algorithm to console out a chart
- Design a URL shortener like system
- What are your goals
and some other behavioral questions
Weirdly intense HR screen followed by behavioral and system design. Pretty standard stuff all around. I think there was one more round with the CTO or something but I didn't get there. Vibes were not fantastic in the interviews themselves.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Behavioral was standard STAR stuff, interviewer was more focused on getting through his list of questions than having a conversation --- felt a bit like the behavioral interview of getting leetcode questions; if you really want to pass make sure you have some fake stories memorized.
System design was a kind of confusing amped-up variation of the bit.ly question that involved near realtime metrics. Some domain knowledge in there made it a little confusing.
