My loop at Chewy went in order from Recruiter Call, technical screening, 4 rounds of interviews (2 technicals, system, and behavioral), then decision. I found that Chewy is taking full advantage out of how bad the market is by being more brazen in scheduling and conducting interviews, where they will only tell you the day before when they will schedule your call within the window you provided. The technical screening is fairly decent, despite being a bit peculiar. It revolved around discussion about Java, the work, and your experience followed by a 25 minute LeetCode Easy hackerrank technical. They asked me very archaic Java trivia like “Explain what Java Autoboxing is” which I was told was not required to be known and after not being able to answer some java questions and finishing the LeetCode question, I moved on to the final 4 rounds. The technicals in the final rounds had two leetcode hards, which that and the system design were asked to be done within 25 minutes after a basic STAR 30 minute behavioral for every round. I completed all rounds, found the optimal solution for one technical and suboptimal for the second, and spoke with a senior engineer for the system design portion where I finished fairly early and got into the more senior/staff level discussions. Generally I found the interviewers mostly refrained from helping and seem tired, while also throwing shade at the company during the qna portion… After a few days post final rounds, the recruiter called me with the decision and gave me an offer, however with the caveat of it being down leveled to the entry level sde 1 position, citing “strong coding ability but gaps in experience” despite my 5 yoe in FAANG with almost half of it being SDE2. I was told if I verbally accepted, I would only have 2 days to accept the written offer (again no respect for time). For a SDE2 position, I found the interview process to already be excessive, but the downleveling to an entry level position was too bizarre for me to accept and would be unheard of if the market was anywhere close to being normal. It felt like they wanted me to do the same work as an SDE2 but with a SDE1 salary and the dangling promotion motivation. With all of the red flags shown in the process, I would not recommend anyone apply/work here.
