Interviewing for Engineering

• 1. Phone Screening
• 2. Technical Interview
• 3. Collaborative / Team Interview
• 4. Follow Up

1. Phone Screening

Goal: Get a feel for high level technical background and culture fit

• Introduce self

  • Role
  • Time at Revver
  • Family
  • Hobbies

• Get to know them

  • tell me about you (family, hobbies, etc)
  • tell me about your education
  • tell me about your work history

• Describe Revver

  • Document Management Software
    • History
      • desktop, EFCO, SD, Utopia
    • Have some legacy systems
    • Utopia Architecture
    • Atlantis Architecture
    • Challenges
      • Delivering new features while maintaining and migrating architecture
    • Great Team
      • Executive Team cares about you
        • 4 day work week
      • Really fun team
      • Great people across entire product group

• Describe the Role

  • Senior Engineer
    • Tackle Complex Work
    • Help Architect and Drive Technical Direction
    • Mentor Other engineers
    • Technical owner of functionality, elements, or processes
    • Take on leadership roles

• Experience with Technology

  • Git
    • Pull Requests
  • Back end web development
    • C# and .NET
  • Front End Web Development
    • React and Typescript
  • Azure and AWS
    • Serverless (Azure Functions)
    • App Service
    • Other Cloud Services
  • SQL and No SQL (Database)
    • Postgresql and Cosmos
  • Testing
    • Unit, Integration, Load
  • CI / CD
    • Azure Dev Ops
    • Daily Releases
  • Clean Code
    • are they passionate about it
  • Architecture
    • How involved have you been?
    • Documentation?
  • How do you stay up to date w/ Technology?
  • Any other experience?
    • IT / Dev Ops / Testing / Project Management / Design

• Experience w/ Process

  • Agile and Scrum
    • ADO, JIRA
    • PO / Scrum Master Experience
    • Story Points
  • Code Review
    • What is it?
    • Why is it important?
    • Last time you saw bad code?
  • Collaboration
  • Working w/ PM's and Design
    • Designing and collaborating on features
  • Working w/ QA
  • Mentoring

• Culture Fit

  • Remote vs In Office
  • Gauge if they have fun and enjoy software engineering?
    • What is your passion and what do you enjoy working on the most?
  • Team Player?
    • What has you team interactions been like in previous roles?

Leave time for candidate to ask questions at the end

2. Technical Interview

General

• "What is your passion, what do you enjoy working on the most?"
• "What does your current/previous work-day like?"
• "Describe the project you've worked on that you're most proud of. What did you do that worked out particularly well?” (Tells us a lot about what they know, value, and have done on teams)
• “Describe the project you've worked on that you're least proud of. What would you do differently?” (Tells us a lot about how good they are at learning from their mistakes and how difficult it is for them to admit they made a mistake)

Pair Programming

White Board

reference: https://www.tryexponent.com/blog/how-to-whiteboard-for-system-design-interviews (in particular video on facebook messenger app design)

Text Messaging App (like Facebook Messenger)

• Requirements

  • Two users need to be able to send messages to each other back and forth

• Other details

  • date and time of each message
  • who sent each message

How would you design the database to store required data?

• in Postgres / relational database?
• would it look and different in CosmosDB / NoSql db?

Requirements to add and see how db design changes (perhaps design it out in sql with all requirements and then see difference in design for no sql)

• Name a conversation
• show if a user is online or not
• add more than 2 users to a conversation

Architecture and Technical Goals - Interviewers can draw a simple architecture of users => load balancer => api servers => db - they can add to the architecture if needed

Low Latency - what are some strategies you could use to make sure users get new messages quickly? - try and get them to give pros and cons of each strategy - short polling (pulling data periodically) - long polling (server holds request until response is available) - web sockets (signal r, for server to client communication)

• High Volume
  • What are some strategies you could implement to handle really high volume? and how will each help with handling that high volume?
    • db?
      • no sql, how?
        • partitioning data correctly so load is distributed across many partitions
      • caching?
        • less traffic to the db
    • api
      • serverless functions
        • better scalibility

• Reliability
  • What could you do to make the system more reliable / robust?
    • queueing system (azure storage queues, rabbit mq)
      • more responsive api server
      • throttle database load
    • publisher / subcriber
      • push model to allow services / users recieve updates in real time and not add load to system to see if anything is available
      • event grid

3. Collaborative / Team Interview

Goal:

• Will this person fit into our team culturally
• Do they seem to have the skills you would hope for in a senior engineer

Who is in this interview?

• 3 or 4 people
• Brock and / or Logan
• Bryan, Rachel, Josh
• Eric

Introductions

• Introduce each person interviewing
• Have Interviewee introduce themselves

Feature walkthrough

• Show a mock up of {insert here} and walk through design
• Explain high level architecture
  • Web app (react), App Server (c# asp.net backend), Postgres DB / relational db
• Questions to ask after design walkthrough
  • What pieces of work need to be completed to implement this design?
  • What challenges do you anticipate with implementing this design?
  • and others

General Questions

• In you experience working w/ component library, what has gone well what hasn't?

4. Follow Up

• Follow Up Questions for Candiate

• Questions from Candidate

• If you like them sell Revver

  • Great Management
  • 4 day work week
  • IL sprints
  • autonomous teams
  • stay up to date on tech
  • very collaboritive
  • perhaps share your own experience

• • How they would be a good fit

• • if early on in process
    • may not move super quickly on an offer
    • that doesn't mean it didn't go well or we're not interested
    • I'll keep in touch and try to be transparent with where we're at on our end
    • it would be awesome if you could also keep us in the loop as far as like other substantial opportunities developing