I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Merge API
Interview
Only had a recruiter call which ended in less than 15 minutes.
Recruiter immediately asked if I was fine with working in the office 5 days a week. I mentioned that I prefer being remote but that in-person would be fine as well. Recruiter clearly did not like my answer and decided that I wasn't worth the time. I repeatedly stressed that in-person was an option for me and even after repeating myself multiple times the recruiter refused to move forward with the interview and ended the call by saying that I should rethink my decision on whether or not I want to work at Merge API.
I received an email shortly after and was provided with a few links about Merge's "culture" and the job description which I found extremely condescending. Why would I apply to a role that I did not read the description for? I decided to take the recruiter's advice and realized that this is not a place I would want to work for, let alone even attempt to interview for.
Standard recruiter phone screen and one hour technical round. They gave heads up on topics - DFS/BFS, Rest, JSON. Interviewer was late by a couple minutes and did not interact much during interview. The question did not require REST knowledge, and interviewer asked about SQL instead.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Basic SQL questions (despite not discussing that during phone screen) Simple graph traversal
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Merge API (New York, NY) in Jul 2023
Interview
Had a pre-screen with recruiter followed by a technical screen over and 3 on-site interviews. The interview process was overall pretty good and transparent and I thought the team was nice to be around.
However, I found the portion with the last interviewer to be kind of abrasive and condescending. We basically just went through my job history on LinkedIn and was accused of having performance issues at previous roles because I didn't have a long tenure there. I was grilled for leaving a position after a couple of years for a higher role at another company.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. Pre screen: easy-medium coding question specific to company related to recursion and graphs. Given heads up on topic before interview which was really nice
2. On site medium-hard leetcode coding question. Given the choice of either whiteboarding or Codility
3. Systems design question (mostly thinking through DB design for a feature)
4. 30 min behavioral interview