Interview process took 2 month. Got an invitation from hr agency on LinkedIn. Process started from call with hr from agency, home task, technical call with engineering manager and two engineers, culture check call, offer for b2b contract.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Discussion of home task (Ruby on Rails service implementation). very important part of it to make it fully workable and covered with tests plus add example of clear documentation (used Postman docs). Technical question include basic concepts of Rails frameworks, databases, caching technics and example of bug from their side which you need to guide how to investigate,
I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Babbel (Berlin) in Feb 2021
Interview
I applied online via LinkedIn. I was contacted 4 days after applying. The first interview was a phone screen with a Talent Manager. The phone screen involved both technical questions about technologies in the job description and personality questions. Later that day, I was given a coding challenge that I had 1 week to complete. It involved building a card game in Python. The assignment felt like a good assessment of how one would solve real on-the-job problems with well-structured code. I found it to be way more fun than the coding challenges assigned by other companies I applied to. My submission was accepted and I had a final round of back to back interviews a few days later. The first of those interviews was focused on my personality, high-level experience, how I think and how I work others. The second interview was a deeper dive into my technical experience. It also included some code assessment questions and a short live coding question in Python. I received an offer a few days after the final interview. Overall, the process was very fast and felt like a good assessment of my skills and how I would fit on the team. The team was very nice and communication was very straightforward throughout the process. I am accepting the offer.
Background: I was referred internally by a Babbel employee for an opening that they had in one of their departments
My interview experience:
The interview process started with an Introductory Interview with the Talent Acquistion Manager to learn more about me, my past experience and this opportunity helped me learn more about the opening and also gave me the wonderful opportunity to learn more about the work culture at Babbel :)
A next step was a Hiring Manager interview with an Engineering Manager and a Senior Software Engineer who was soon to become an Engineering Manager:
In this interview I was asked mainly asked situational-based questions which in a way assessed my interpersonal and soft skills, a few technical questions too, it also gave me the opportunity to ask the interview panel more team and role-related questions to better understand what they were looking for. Towards the end of this interview: I was supposed to have a coding challenge as a next step but due to being in the final stages of interviews with other companies and because I had to move houses during the same time I had requested the interview panel if they could please consider one of my existing code samples instead of me solving their coding challenge and I have a feeling because they felt I was a good match to what they were looking for based on how the interview went they were happy to consider my request and said they will speak to the People & Operations team before they could confirm on this. The interview did go a little over time as well and the panel was also kind enough to give me their email id as I didn't get a chance to ask them some more role related questions towards the end.
The interview panel agreed to skip the coding challenge and I was allowed to submit an existing coding sample. Towards the end, I had a follow-up Tech Interview with 2 Senior Software Engineers(one of whom was already in the previous round), there wasn't any pairing involved(I just went prepared in case) when it came to the actual tech interview but a lot of good technical questions to test my knowledge around Ruby and other tools like Elasticsearch etc., which were specific to the job
description and also related to my past experience.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Soft Skills question: Questions related to prioritization and collaboration with the tech team members and the other stakeholders like the product manager based on a given situation like for e.g., the scope of deliverables within a given time frame.
Tech question: Tell us about one of the most challenging technical task that you've had to work on in your experience thus far and related questions around that.