I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Boulevard
Interview
I was cold emailed by on their internal recruiters. I did an intro call which was super friendly and then passed over to Karat for a tech screen.
The tech screen was...weird. The person interviewing me was not even from Boulevard and was a little hard to understand. The interview was an hour long and consisted of some rapid fire System Design Questions, a Leetcode Medium and a Leetcode Hard all in 1 hour. I was not really told much about the System Design interview beforehand and the interviewer was simply just recording answers.
Got a rejection stating that even though I was able to do the coding question fine they felt like I was not able to design systems lol...based on a weird ten minute rapid fire session conducted by a disengaged proxy.
From what I have read on them, they seem overly nitpicky which is why they mass recruit people and just throw them at Karat. Very disrespectful and indicative of bad culture.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
System Design Questions. Word Wrap Leetcode Hard question.
Enjoyed my discussion with the internal recruiter. Didn't get past the Karat interview, which is used as an initial phase before the virtual onsite.
Not crazy about Karat, but it is what it is. Sounds like they pick from a rotating group of leetcode questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
System design portion where asked to suggest ways to improve performance given 3 different API requests, followed by a question to determine the number of servers needed given some arbitrary request details
Two step leetcode, sudoku validator then sudoku solver
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Boulevard in Feb 2025
Interview
In my experience they hire only trough consultant firms - had like 4 different recruiters - from different consultancy companies - reach out to me for the same role.
The process depends on the consultancy firm I guess, after they got interested in me, I had a 2h interview and the interviewer told me the client wanted to know all those things.
So, about 1h20m answering questions about everything - from infrastructure, to database, backend, frontend, architecture and all.
After you're very tired of a extensive Q&A, you have 40 minutes to implement the system design challenge.
Long story short: If you fail the design challenge you're gone. It's wasn't a hard challenge, but it's a lot to keep focused on for 2h, and I think the system design time window should be longer if that's what's gonna weight more in the end, probably removing some Q&A questions that you can evaluate from the system design.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What's the difference between controlled and uncontrolled components in react