Circle Internet Financial Senior Software Engineer interview questions

I received a take-home challenge through the CodeSignal platform from a recruiter. The challenge was supposed to take one hour to complete and included four steps. I managed to finish 3 out of 4 steps within the time limit. However, the next day, I got an email from CodeSignal saying they couldn’t verify my assessment because I either screenshared or copied the problem description. This was confusing since I had my screen shared the entire time, my camera was on, and I even scanned my ID — all of this for a simple take-home assessment. After spending a lot of time thinking about what could have gone wrong, I realized that I had copied the function signature from the problem description and pasted it into the code window to save time because CodeSignal’s autocomplete wasn’t working. I genuinely believe no developer from their team tested the take-home challenge, or they would have faced the same issue.

I applied to Circle in April of '24 for a Senior Software Engineer position and the recruiter let me know that the position was just filled but a Senior AI Engineer position was about to open up and we spoke briefly about it and how I could be a fit. I then had a thirty minute interview with an engineering manager as a screening interview, the following week I had a design and coding interview. Design interview was an hour long and coding interview was 90 minutes. After the interviews I was told that based on the design interview the team felt I wasn't Senior enough for the role. The recruiter then said he could offer a Software Engineering role but the pay was significantly reduce and I did not want to take a step down in title and pay. Fast forward to November and I notice that Circle was hiring for a Senior Software Engineer. I apply again and the hiring team reached out with instructions for a coding exercise on CodeSignal. The coding exercise is a 90 minute proctored exam. I then receive a score from CodeSignal about the exam and nothing from the hiring team despite sending a email after a week. The difference in the hiring process in seven months went down hill. It went from great communication to almost zero and it feels like there is minimal effort to connect with the candidate now. As a candidate it is frustrating to put in a few hours of your time (practice exam and actual exam) to then be ghosted because of an automated process you don't have any visibility or feedback on. If I filled this out back in April I would have given a thumbs up rating but this most recent time was a negative experience and I have to rate it as such.