I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Zendesk (Sydney) in Oct 2021
Interview
The entire interview process was conducted remotely.
After chatting with the recruiter that reached out to me about this role, we set up a phone screen with a couple of the Engineering Managers where I was asked some behavioural questions related to my current work and why I want to join Zendesk etc.
After making through this round the next stage was three one-hour interview sessions where two of them needed to be back-to-back in one day, so I scheduled two of them on one day and the third one on a different day. All of the interviews involved me speaking with a couple of Engineering Managers from Zendesk.
For the two back-to-back sessions, the first session was a pair programming exercise where I was given a question prompt and to implement a solution in my IDE choice while screen-sharing. After a short break, the second session was a system architecture interview where I talked in-length about a system I worked on and answered questions regarding why I made certain choices and to explain in more detail how parts of it worked.
The final interview was a behavioural one where I was asked a project that I worked on from my resume in-depth regarding the decisions I made and challenges I overcame. Some other behavioural questions regarding how I handled conflicts and difficult feedbacks were also asked.
A couple of days after all of the interviews concluded I was extended an offer, but I declined it in the end in favour of one that was slightly better and whose work was a bit interesting for me. I was very happy with the whole interview process as everyone was extremely friendly and nice which helped keep my stress levels very low.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
- Tell me about a time you had a difficult conversation. What happened? And how did you go about resolving the situation?
- What are you looking to focus on primarily for your next role?
- Why do you want to join Zendesk?