I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Lazada (Ho Chi Minh City) in May 2015
Interview
Online by Skype.
Just, asked multiple questions - behavioral and technical, without coding. Discussed how to deal with accident situations.
But I had good internal recommendation.
Overall positive experience and HR's was helpful - show office and welcome.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at Lazada (London, England)
Interview
4 rounds altogether: 2 technical, 2 behavioural (1 with HR, 1 with VP).
Everyone I met or spoke to was generally very nice. Technical questions were not too difficult and behavioural ones were fairly standard ones.
My two big gripes:
1. The TA who organised the interviews was incredibly pushy and rushed the whole process. Arranged 2 interviews nearly back to back, shows the first of those two interviews was not important to them. Very little respect was shown for my own time- expected me to rearrange my schedule with only a few hours notice. This was more stressful than the actual interviews.
2. They offered me way below my asking salary and removed some of the benefits that was told earlier would be included. Told me was because I was judged on my technical skills. I declined the offer, then they came back with my original asking salary plus the extras they removed previously. Declined again.
Rated neutral because the interviewers themselves were actually very nice and the questions asked were reasonable. Just hope that you get a more understanding TA in your own interview process.
I applied through a staffing agency. The process took 4 months. I interviewed at Lazada (Shenzhen, Guangdong) in Mar 2019
Interview
This is one of the worst experiences I've ever had.
First a third party recruiter contacts me. I asked her what would be the salary range and she tells me it's going to be between 600k-2M RMB per year.
I go ahead with the process. I go through 4-5 interviews.
At the end they would like to give me an offer. They ask what my current salary and expected salary is. I tell them exactly what I was told in the beginning and give them something within the range. They told me I ask too much.
Furthermore, they also wanted me to provide proof of my current salary. I sent them that.
2 weeks later they got me an offer; paying only 35000 RMB a month.
It was such a waste of time. I talk to my 3rd party recruiter, she says it's still a good salary and most people don't get. Well this salary is a lot lower than their initial range.
I could understand if their base salary was low but they had other good benefits, but unfortunately no. Their package is terrible, only 2 months of salary offered as bonus; no stock; no real benefits; no signing bonus (and as foreigner you have to spend a month doing nothing due to visaa, so no money to compensate that either). On top of that only offer 10 days of annual leave. So it would have been a definite downgrade from my existing job.
At the end the recruiter gives me feedback; it's one of the worst ways of assessing a candidate. It literally had 3-4 word sentences of my positive and negative sides. The sad thing is negative sides were something like "doesn't have ecommerce experience".
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The questions vary. However, it didn't include any coding questions. Most interviewers have terrible English skill. They don't really understand you, and sometimes don't even know how to say things correctly.
For example, "Do you know ACID?" (he pronounces ACID as "a, c, i, d" all letters individually spelled out) instead of pronouncing as the word "acid". So if you say no, terrible, you now got a negative mark. He explains what it is, then you say oh you mean acid, which stands for "Atomicty, Consistency..." and then he agrees; but doesn't matter. You already got a negative point there.
Most questions are basically like that "do you know x framework" or "x technology". Other type of technical question is "tell me about the architecture of what you're working on" and then when you talk about it, they ask something about that architecture. The problem is, sometimes they ask irrelevant part, which you don't really mention in the architecture. For example if you're doing some back-end work for some product, they might ask you something related to front end. It just seemed to me that they want to steer the conversation to the areas which is outside of your main responsible area.
The other thing they insisted was, Alibaba specific open source technologies. They expect you to know it.
Best way to study this interview is:
1) Study your tech stack. If it is Java for example, read a lot about how JVM works, threading works, GC works, memory model works etc.
2) Get the job description, read about all the frameworks. Especially if they list something you've not heard of it; or not too sure how it works.
This is for back-end purposes. They don't seem to use RESTful APIs, insist using RPC frameworks. So do read up about the web frameworks' RPC support.