Onsite Interview Engineering

What will happen and who will you be meeting?

Before your interviewing starts, you will be given an informal tour around the office and workspace.

Your on-site interviews will last a half day and will consist of four or five interviews of 60 minutes each at our local office. Your interviewers are the members of the team you’ll work with if you are hired, and there will be an engineer/ scientist chosen from another team. (The last round will be with another Senior Engineer or Manager based in our HQ – only for London & Seattle). All interviews are technical and equally graded.

There are 4-5 rounds of face-to-face interviews at our local office. You will be interviewed by two of your peers for the initial interviews (2) and then the hiring manager. The last round will be with another Senior Engineer or Manager.

You will be meeting with the team for Lunch where you will get to chat with the team and ask any questions you wish.

What to Wear

Like most tech companies, we are happy to suggest that dressing casually is sufficient. If you feel at home in jeans in a hoodie, go for it. The important thing is that you feel comfortable. If you prefer business casual to show your best self and yearn on the safe side, choose whatever you prefer.

How should I be preparing for it?

At Quantcast we are looking for well-rounded Engineers. We hire for strong technical skills but we believe that engineering is not just coding but figuring out how to solve problems, how to sell ideas, how to manage an idea and complexity of the problem.

  • The code you write in the interviews are probably the only examples of your code that your interviewer sees. This is your chance to shine. We not only look for the quality of your code but also how you solve problems. We want to see your thought processes as you work through each stage of the programming problem. Interaction is key here.
  • Of course, the less help you need to solve the problem, the better but showing an intelligent thought process, talking through your solution and responding well to the hints you are given is also important.
  • Clarify any ambiguity you have been asked for, ask questions.
  • A whiteboard will be available to you, should you need to write your thoughts or work through a technical problem.
  • The simpler you can explain your answers, the better as it shows you really understood what you were doing. Don’t assume everyone is on the same page with you.
  • Share your specific individual contributions and be ready to claim credit for your achievement. However, be prepared to clarify if your achievements are attained through teamwork or collaboration.
  • Treat your interviewer like he or she is your partner and you are collaborating to build a new product.Think of interview process as less about being evaluated and more about working with another person.
  • You might not know the answer to one of the questions, you might run out of space while white-boarding. There a million other things that might go wrong, the trick to doing well is staying calm!
  • Last but not least… have fun with it!!

Additional Resources

LeetCode Geeks For Geeks Programming Interviews Exposed