I applied through a staffing agency. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Torstone Technology (London, England) in Dec 2021
Interview
From what I recall it was pretty seemless, and I was asked challenging and interesting problems as part of the process. It was obvious they became particularly interested in me as a candidate after one of the initial interviews. From there it was pretty frictionless.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
LeetCode/Hackerrank style algo question. You probably wont be asked to or won't have to implement all of it. I was asked to describe a method, I presented an idea, and then got most of the way with an implementation before running out of time. They were happy with the attempt
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Torstone Technology (New York, NY)
Interview
Initially was a video call with the recruiter which was very friendly. He went through some details of the resume, interests of the company, salary expectations, relocation preferences.
The second is a technical interview with very broad topics ranging from internet protocols to databases, API alternatives and modern C++ knowledge (code review). The interview in my concept was difficult but it also made it clear the depth of expertise they were looking for. The interviewer was very respectful but also trying to test the limits of your knowledge in all the different topics
The second interview was a live coding session with two problems. The first one being how to check if a given string was or not a palindrome, to propose a solution, propose improvements of your solution and think of edge cases. The second problem included a long statement to solve the traversal of a tree using BFS.
The third interview is a meeting with team members and CTO but I didn't go through it.
The engineers that interviewed me were all very knowledgeable, with more than four years in the company, one of them seemed disengaged and not really focusing on the interview but doing some other work in parallel but might have just been perception.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How does a web browser work?
What’s a REST api? How does it compare with GRCP/RPC?
What’s the difference between processes and threads?
How do different processes communicate?
How to increase the performance of a query to a database that has 4 joints and it is taking minutes to execute?
What's normalization on a database?
What’s const correctness?
What kind of containers are you familiar with in STL?
What kind of data structure holds an ordered_map?
How does hashmap work?
What’s the worst time complexity to retrieve a value from a map?
What’s the worst time complexity in a tree?
Design patterns.
Copy constructors and move semantics.
C++ abstract classes
OOP concepts
Static members
Many, many more