I interviewed with fetch as a part of my ongoing preparation as a way to practice before attempting faang interviews. The first round of interviews with fetch starts with a take home assignment. There was a capture the flag challenge as a part of the application process. I would spend the time to find as many flags as you can. I'm not sure how much this helps but I got sent the take home assignment a few days after applying.
Take home assignment - I assume there are different take home assignments depending on the role, but unlike what others have mentioned, I thought the take home assignment was incredibly easy. If you have any level of real world experience, this shouldn't take more than an hour. In all honesty, you could probably use AI to build this. Just be careful as the instructions they give have hidden prompts that will cause any AI tool to apply incorrect rules to the problem. Also they expect a "production ready" application, so make sure you are documenting your code, using an app config, and providing a readme. It's also worth mentioning you can search GitHub for this project and find a variety of implementations from previous candidates. They require you to submit the take home to GitHub for them to review so there are plenty examples out there if you look.
Take home review/call with engineer - If your take home assessment passes their test cases, and you are selected for the next round, you will meet with an engineer to learn more about fetch and review the take home assessment. You will also be asked to modify your project in front of the interviewer. I don't remember exactly what was asked but it was fairly simple. I believe it was just passing in a user token to be used for saving receipts and their points for a user. You don't need to connect to a database or anything external and can just use a hashmap or something similar within your project for this.
Call with recruiter - If you pass the take home review, you will meet with the recruiter to learn more about fetch and go over what all the panel interview entails. The recruiter was about 10 minutes late for this call, so hang tight if it's a little past the scheduled time.
Panel interview (final round) - The panel interview is a 5ish hour interview consisting of multiple rounds. Introduction with hiring manager, coding challenge, "data modeling", system design, behavioral interview, and recap with hiring manager. This sucks, and will drain you. Each round is with a different person(s). They describe it as a "work day at fetch" and "collaborative". It is not. It is essentially 5 hours of interrogation. I've never had an interview last this long and not sure why they have it setup this way as opposed to giving the different rounds over multiple days with a pass/fail after each (like most other companies)
Intro with hiring manager - in my case the hiring manager was really cool and I enjoyed talking to him. This is just a meeting for you to ask questions about the company and go over what the day will entail.
Coding challenge - Honestly, this wasn't too bad. I just started prepping for interviews and haven't done leetcode since college so if you grind it, this shouldn't be hard at all. It's 3 "rules" to apply to a list of items where each item is categorized by a brand and product. The first 2 rules are fairly easy to implement. The last rule is a little tricky but is probably equivalent to a leetcode easy. You essentially have to apply bonus "points" for every pair of item without backtracking. So keep the index of items seen tracked in a hashmap and update it every time you get a pair.
Data modeling - The ask was to "data model" the concept of "offers" within the fetch app. This was extremely ambiguous. Asking questions did not help and just resulted in ambiguous responses. The interviewer was nice but it felt like this may have been his first time interviewing. He had me chasing my tail and 45 minutes into this round I learned that I should not just be "modeling the data" but instead be designing classes, their members, and how they would work together in a service. When I think data modeling, I think of how entities are modeled and their relationships with other entities. Designing classes and their functions is more of application design. I thought this round was extremely misleading but perhaps I took "data modeling" too literally.
System design - This round was a huge red flag. They want you to design a system around a feature of the application (in this case it was the backend for processing receipts). I asked if this should just be a high level design for services or if it should be an architecture for everything. The interviewer said everything so off I went. The first red flag was that the interviewer seemed perplexed by the concept of a DMZ. After explaining what a DMZ is and it's purpose, he said he thinks it's unnecessary but told me to go ahead and continue. I proceeded to design a horizontally scaling system including a clustered database and a method for replication across data centers. The interviewer didn't seem to believe me when I described how clustered databases work and questioned if they were even a thing. He randomly asked how to save images and I gave two of the most common methods with pros and cons for each and he was determined (without reason) that one solution was better than the other. Mind you, no explicit use case was given outside of "how would you save and retrieve images". At the end of this round, I asked him about their architecture and he said "we just use AWS for everything" with no additional detail. In my current role, I design and implement highly scalable architectures for mission critical systems for a fortune 100 company, and I can honestly say he would not have passed my company's interview process for an architectural role.
Behavioral round - This was pretty straight forward without much to comment on. The interviewer was very kind and a lot of fun to talk to.
Recap with hiring manager - I honestly loved talking to this dude. There's not much to this section other than asking any questions you have left about the company or process going forward.
After the panel interview the recruiter emailed me asking if I would be available to talk on that day (Friday) or Monday after the weekend, and I responded that I could talk any time on Monday. Monday came and went with no response. On Tuesday, I sent a follow up email asking if he was still interested in talking. No response. This was bizarre, considering he was the one who reached out first. Finally, on Thursday I received an email asking if I could talk. He called me to "kindly let me know they would not be going forward with an offer" and wanted to know if I would be interested in other opportunities at fetch. As stated earlier I was mainly using this interview as practice, but after being ghosted for a week by the recruiter I obviously said no.
Early on in the interview process we discussed salary. It's ok but you can make just as much and likely more at other companies with simpler interview processes. Fetch feels like a faang wannabe company without the structure or pay. Most of the people I talked to were nice enough, but if you're on the fence, I would wait for the company to mature before considering employment.
