How Mercor interviews engineers with its own AI
6 min read A breakdown of Mercor’s four-round engineering loop, from the AI interviewer that reads your resume to the vibe-coding session on the super day. Read article
Interview Prep
Coding Interview Questions
What analytics engineering interviews actually test in dbt
7 min read The dbt and SQL questions that come up in analytics engineering interviews, and how to reason through the ones built to trip you up. Read article
Interview Prep
What a Dagster Labs engineering interview really tests
7 min read A breakdown of the rounds, the questions, and what Dagster Labs actually screens for when hiring platform and product engineers. Read article
Interview Prep
What to study first for a data engineering interview
6 min read A prep roadmap for data engineering loops covering which SQL, modeling, and pipeline topics get tested and the order to study them. Read article
Interview Prep
The ‘why do you want to work here’ answer that survives follow-ups
6 min read What interviewers are actually checking with this question, how to research a company in an hour, and worked answers that hold up under follow-ups. Read article
Interview Prep
What to actually say when asked your greatest weakness
6 min read The question rewards a real weakness attached to proof you’re working on it, and punishes the rehearsed non-answers most candidates reach for. Read article
System Design
Design a message queue without hand-waving the hard parts
7 min read A walkthrough of the delivery, ordering, and durability decisions a message-queue design round actually grades. Read article
System Design
How to design a web crawler that stays polite at a billion pages
7 min read A walkthrough of the web crawler design question, from the URL frontier and politeness to deduplication and the follow-ups that trip candidates up. Read article
System Design
How to design a URL shortener that survives real traffic
6 min read The design choices behind a URL shortener that interviewers actually probe, from short-code generation to caching and the 301-versus-302 redirect. Read article
Company Guides
What the Vanta engineering interview actually screens for
7 min read Vanta’s 90-minute practical coding round, not the algorithms screen, is where most candidates lose the loop. Read article
Interview Prep
Why the SpaceX interview feels nothing like a FAANG loop
7 min read What the SpaceX software loop actually screens for, from the citizenship gate to the take-home and the debugging round. Read article
Interview Prep
What Anduril Actually Asks Software Engineers
7 min read A breakdown of Anduril’s six-session software engineering loop, the graph-heavy coding rounds, the design round that expects working code, and how the defense-motivation screen is scored. Read article
Interview Prep
What the Sourcegraph engineering interview actually tests
7 min read How Sourcegraph structures its engineering loop, the code-intelligence questions it favors, and how the recent Amp spinout changes what you’re interviewing for. Read article
Interview Prep
What Reddit’s engineering interview actually tests
6 min read Reddit runs a short, scale-focused loop where even the coding rounds turn into questions about serving nearly 100 million daily users. Read article
Interview Prep
What Shopify actually tests in its engineering interviews
6 min read A round-by-round look at Shopify’s engineering loop, from the Life Story call to the AI-allowed pairing exercise, and how each one is scored. Read article
