The interview process consisted of an HR screening, a technical manager deep dive, technical coding questions, and an on-site interview. The HR screening was primarily a resume walkthrough. The technical manager interview focused on a deeper discussion of my experience and past projects. The technical portion included four coding challenges, mostly around parsing and breaking words from a string containing spaces and special characters, plus one problem involving recursion over nested arrays. The on-site interview included what they call a “system design” exercise for a hotel booking system. However, this was not a traditional system design interview. The focus was primarily on coding the booking logic on a whiteboard rather than discussing scalability, load, or architecture. When I asked typical system design questions (for example, expected load), I was told those details were not relevant. The interview followed a very scripted format, so it’s best to be prepared to quickly outline a few database tables for the booking flow and move straight into implementing the logic on the whiteboard. This was followed by a casual coffee chat with one of the engineers, a product demo, and a final round with the VP, which was mostly an opportunity to ask questions.