I applied through other source. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Samsara (San Francisco, CA) in Nov 2017
Interview
The office is located in a sketchy neighborhood (human waste on pavements and LOTS of homeless people around), but the interior decoration was nice. There were pool table, ping-pong table and board games just like every other startup in the Bay Area. And the workers there brag about those things just like how workers from every other startup do.
The engineering team is very small(~30 people) and I guess that's the reason why they are more elitist when picking new people. BTW MIT and Stanford alumni make up the most of the eng team, so if you are not from THAT kind of school, try your best to out-perform like maybe giving the answers even before you hear the questions, because from my experience, giving the correct answers after you hear the question is still not a good enough performance for them.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
One easy question from a situation of their product, one easy question from leetcode
First a HR call - goes into project details, what you're looking for, etc
Got connected to a Hiring Manager for a project deep dive + TPS round within the hour. TPS question not too difficult - not leetcode.
live coding session, create a md to html translator. It was all live with unique requirements making it more difficult than I expected using regex. The interviewer was not personable and it was a very uncomfortable experience
I made it to the technical screen and didn't proceed further. Recruiter call was the usual experience dive, comp discussion, and why you are looking for a job. The technical screen was a string parsing question.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Technical: String parsing. Be comfortable with regex
