Coding Interview

The goal of the Coding Interview interview is for us to understand how you solve problems with code and assess that alongside your level of mastery of a chosen programming language and your communication skills.

<aside> 🙏 To help us see your full range of skills, please select the programming language you’re most familiar with.

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Here is what you need to know beforehand:

Logistics

• We know that this kind of interview may be a source of stress: we'll keep things very friendly and your interviewer is there to help you out when needed.
• We will run the interview through CoderPad - an online interactive platform that allows us to host the coding exercise and will send you a link ahead of the call. We will still run the call through Zoom.
• For our backend interview, you can use whatever programming language you feel most comfortable with from the 40+ supported by CoderPad. Our frontend interview requires knowledge of Javascript.
• You can use Google, Stack Overflow or other tools to support you during the interview, but no Github Copilot.
  • Please tell us when you’re about to search the Internet for something. It’s meant to be used for syntax, library functions, etc. – not helping solve the problem itself.

Scope of the interview

• We'll ask you to write a small program that solves a defined problem.
• We'll want to see how you test your code. There is no need to use a formal testing framework, such as pytest or Jest, for this. It's fine to just run a few examples in whatever way you wish to see if the code behaves as expected.
• Throughout the interview we'd like to focus on communication skills as well: how you communicate with your interviewer (technical colleague) in a pair programming scenario. Pretending that this interview is pair programming is totally the right way to go about it.
• This is not going to be an algorithmic/Google-style/LeetCode-style problem - something that's much more approachable and hopefully more common in your day to day.

Project Deep Dive

Project Deep Dive is an interview style we use across various roles to determine a candidate’s skills in project management, collaboration with others and decision making.

Interview format

In the project deep dive we'll ask you to walk us through a project you worked on in the past that best demonstrates your skills. This interview starts with a short presentation from you (taking no more than 20-25% of the interview time) and then we’ll move into a conversation. To support your presentation, you can bring diagrams or even slides if you prefer. At minimum, we encourage you to spend some time to select the project and to prepare a clear outline of what you would like to cover.

Picking a project

Please pick a project that ideally has already been finished so that we can look at your abilities end-to-end. We also want to hear about projects that best demonstrate the breadth & depth of your skills. Feel free to use your Isometric point of contact to brainstorm ideas and help you select a project.

What we want to understand about your project

• What was it? What problem did it solve? What was the outcome at the end?
• What was your role in it?
• Can you describe how it worked / how it was built?
• What key technical decisions had to be made?
• What did your collaboration with other team members look like?
• What did you learn from it? What would you do differently next?

Skills we’re looking for

• Ability to learn from decisions made; analyzing technical & business trade-offs
• Ability to collaborate with others and resolve conflicts
• Depth of level in understanding of the technical matter the project is solving
• Ability to effectively project manage and drive successful outcomes

Data Modelling

In the data modelling interview we'll ask you to design the data model to underpin a backend software system, as well as consider the architecture and interactions with other parts of the system.