The process consisted of a mix of personal and technical interviews with members of the engineering team. The interviewers were kind and supportive, and there was good communication throughout the interview process.
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at StarLeaf (London, England) in Feb 2021
Interview
Applied online and heard back within 10 days. Set up a phone interview for the following week.
Went through basic introduction and explanations of StarLeaf. Following we discussed my most recent project to a somewhat deep level; design decisions, architecture etc. Then about 30 min in, we moved into a coding interview with some systems discussions. discussed logic, designed brute force and then a couple more optimal solutions. A few more systems design questions followed and finished the interview in about 55 min.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Tell me more about the design process of your most recent project?
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at StarLeaf in May 2020
Interview
Applied through recruiter in late Spring/ early Summer 2020. First round with junior SWE (2-3 years experience), asked about past projects and an algorithm design question, didn't care about the programming language. Difficulty level I'd say between easy and medium on hacker rank, skewed towards easy. Total 1hour or 1hour 30 mins, can't remember. Overall very pleasant, interviewer seemed to think the same
Second and final stage with senior engineers. Effectively 3 interviews in one, last one with CEO/founder, can't remember. First round system design, second round talk about past projects/what I'd like to do and general background, third round similar, CEO/founder asked very good questions about past projects.
Not as happy with this stage, lasted about 4 hours, it was never clear whether I had a break between the rounds. Overall impression is the wanted someone with more experience than me. To be clear: if you've done, say, one good internship, you have a decent 2:1 and either did an interesting programming wise thesis at uni or have another good internship, you'll be fine.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design classes for a board game. Efficient algorithm for looking up stuff in database.