It was a rather long process, starting with a 30-minute Recruiter screen, followed a week later by a 30-minute Hiring Manager screen, followed a week later by a 3-hour two-part interview (one part System Design for 90 minutes, followed by a 30-minute break, followed by a 60-minute pull request review), followed a week later by a 2-hour two-part interview (one part behavioral/"Leadership" screen with the Head of Data Engineering, one part 60-minute practical coding problem), followed a week later by a final loop (that I didn't make it to, but looking at other reviews, would have been another multi-part/multi-hour loop). The interviewers were super friendly for the most part, and the system design, practical coding, and pull request interviews were engaging and a unique way of conducting interviews - much better than the standardized leetcode tests of other companies. The drawn-out process was one obvious concern, but I didn't find the "Leadership" interview to be a particularly well-oiled component either. The engineering leader asked the typical questions about me and particularly significant projects I worked on, and I felt good about my responses to those, but he ended with a few curveball questions that (a) didn't have anything to do with leadership (e.g. "what's the most recent thing you taught yourself" and "what's your most recent contribution to your local community") and (b) seemed to be looking for particular answers. I gave fine answers to these questions, but I could tell from his reactions that I wasn't passing his specific vibe check, and he even ended by implying I shouldn't even bother with the coding phase of my interview (of course I did that portion, but it left a really sour taste in my mouth). In my opinion, this reflected poor leadership on his part, and structuring an interview process to put a gate of his whims a full month in is not only a waste of everyone's time, but Quizlet's own money and resources. For a startup in such a precariously stagnant position, Quizlet really needs to work on innovating, accelerating, and trimming the fat; this interview process should be a prime target.

HR Screening Interview, into a round 1 algorithm technical interview (2 questions in 45 minutes), with a final round including behavioral, management, and a front end/back end technical interview. > Everyone was super friendly and they seemed to have a culture that valued helping people learn. At every technical stage of the interview process, they gave very specific and constructive feedback, better than I've received interviewing anywhere else, over all I was really impressed. Admittedly also bummed that I wasn't able to get an offer. > During the first 1 technical interview, I didn't realize they would be asking me technical questions so it caught me a bit off guard (you write your code in an online IDE and it had to compile/execute correctly, they let you choose the language). I also didn't realize until later that there were meant to be two questions, I took the entire time to finish just the one, but I think I would have been stuck on it either way. They decided to bump me down to a SDE 2 instead of a senior for the final interview, but mentioned I could be bumped back up if I did well in the final rounds. > Final rounds discussed work culture, the team structure/projects I'd be working on, and finally involved both a front end and back end interview (they didn't seem to have explicit front end/backend roles so everyone was expected to be fullstack. I'll give non specific versions of the questions below.