Toptal Software Engineer interview questions

1 - The first interview is a brief (about 20 minutes) behavioral interview. Nothing to be scared of here. As long as you are who you say you are on your application and you can speak English you will be just fine. 2 - Next, you are given a link to an online coding challenge, which you need to complete within two days. It consists of 3 problems which should be solved in 90 minutes once you start. My particular problems varied in difficulty. The first one was very easy, the second was medium and the last one was hard. You need to think about efficiency here, as they give you the specific time and memory requirements for your code. So move fast, but code efficiently. 3 - If you pass that, you will have a live interview with a Toptal engineer over Skype or Hangouts. You will be asked to share your screen so the engineer can see you code in your own preferred environment. I had two questions and they were both very simple. The catch is that they are timed. I had 15 minutes to solve each of them, which turned out to be more than needed. 4 - If everything goes smoothly, you will be given your final project specifications. How long this takes you will depend on your experience. But I'd say you should expect to spend about 20-30 hours on your project. You have 2 weeks to complete it, but start early so you're not rushing at the end. If you have any questions, clarify them with the developer who you will present to. Don't just assume everything on your own. The presentation consists of showing off what you built and then being asked questions about it. My interviewer asked me to see my code and how I implemented some of the features and also asked questions to make sure I actually understood how things like APIs and HTTP requests work. 5 - If you pass the presentation, you are in!

This is information regarding interview process to be a freelance developer at Toptal. After first skype call you will be provided with a link for a coding challenge. It consists of 3 algorithmic problems, similar to the ones you can find on every interview preparation site, and you are given 90 minutes to solve them. You don't need to solve all of them, I guess nailing 2 is enough to pass this round. I'd say this was the hardest round to pass. During next call you will be asked to solve 2 algorithmic problems in 40 minutes sharing your screen with an interviewer. The problems were pretty easy this time. After that you will get an assignment that you need to complete in 2 weeks which is basically implementing a simple website (REST API + client-side SPA), a mobile app or maybe something else, depending on your field of expertise. This was pretty time consuming, it took me no less than 4 full days to finish this, but the assignment itself wasn't hard. When you are done you will present your product to a Toptal developer, and if everything goes smooth you will be accepted as freelance developer.