I applied online. I interviewed at NewsBreak (Mountain View, CA) in Nov 2025
Interview
Pretty standard - Initial Call with Recruiter to talk about background and technical experience, then had technical interview with engineer who worked at the company. The person didn't really seem that engaged
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Asked a few basic website questions like how do users sees webpage on a browser, then asked me a Leetcode DSA in Javascript
First round HR call
Second round Phone screen
Final round In person onsite
Friendly interviewers, system design was quite difficult with domain knowledge, which required previous working experiences to answer.
I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at NewsBreak in July 2025
Interview
Got an email from a recruiter to schedule an interview. Sent an email to interviewer what I would be tested on a week prior... nothing. So I prepared DSA based on comments from glassdoor and got very confident in my LC.
The interviewer straight assumed I spoke Chinese and talked to me in Chinese... I was a little surprised.
First started with introducing my background and a deep dive into the projects.
Then he asked me an easy SQL question. I have not done SQL in a while... It totally caught me off-guard and needed to brush on the syntax and various functions. Was a total disaster and barely finished the query with lots of help from the interviewer. The problem was very straightforward but I was just not in a good shape for SQL.
Terrible experience. If you want to test the candidate, at least let them prepare properly for the interview and not expect them to know everything without preparation. Total waste of time.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a table for records of ad fill_rates, return the records that has > 10% decrease fill_rate compared to the previous day.
fill_rates table:
date ad fill_rate
------------------------------------
01-01 A 20
01-02 A 10
01-01 B 40
01-02 B 5
...