Applied to Verkada online and received an email from the recruiter for a non-technical phone screen. Recruiter did a product demo but asked very few questions about me and could answer very little about what the team did. Red flag #1. Nonetheless, I was convinced by the product so I decided to move forward.
Did a phone screen which was a leetcode hard problem. The phone interviewer seemed uninterested in interviewing me. Another red flag. I assumed I had not made it further due to his impatience, but I heard back that day that I'd been invited to the onsite.
The onsite consisted of a algorithm portion, a systems design portion, a peer programing portion, lunch, then a manager behavioral interview. The coding portion was another fairly niche leetcode hard problem and had one correct solution which I feel like isn't the best type of question when assessing algorithm skill.
Overall, the people seemed very smart. The manager behavioral interview is mostly about which team you would fit in. The manager did not have a good understanding of my interest and offered me a team I had no interest in. Seems like a symptom of trying to grow too fast.
I got the interview by referral. After a call with the recruiter, I got the invitation for phone interview, which is a OOD. I need to implement APIs based on the requirements with Python.
The interviewer arrived late exactly by 9 mins, I was informed that the interview format was one leet code coding, a small system design and some questions towards the end. So in the interview I worked on the problem and came up with the working solution. Still 12 minutes were remaining for 1 hour mark and also 9 more minutes as the interviewer was late by 9 mins (almost 21 mins remaining). The interviewer instead of asking the system design question abruptly ended the interview with "ask any questions". I understand the interviewer may have different expectation even if i provided a working solution, but the format of the interview should be respected, i.e including system design round too. Abruptly changing the interview format midway shows pure arrogance on part of the interviewer. I understand the decision to take the candidate to future interview rounds or making and offer is totally yours, but you can do a better job by making the interview process fair.
4 parts - a call with a recruiter, a frontend technical interview (eg; building out a UI in a timed session), Leetcode style interview, and a behavioral interview with the engineering manager.