My Last Software Engineering Recruiting Cycle

Coming up on 2 years in Seattle, I decided it was time for me to cut back to the East Coast. I had just gotten promoted at work, and was looking to make the cross country move to NYC.

My roommate was also moving in March, and to make it simpler I really tried to align our moves together so we could also live together in NYC. Originally my plan was to just do an internal transfer. However, Amazon just had 2 rounds of layoffs, and so it was super difficult to do an internal transfer. And so my only option was to find a new job.

Interview Prepping

I had not recruited for software since junior year of college (2022), so I was hella rusty. The software recruitment process generally follows these steps:

Initial Screen Interviews:

• Recruiter screen, phone call, 30 min

• Technical coding screen, LeetCode style, 1 hr

Onsite (~5 hrs, sometimes split across 2 days):

• Coding (x2), data structures & algorithms, LeetCode style, 1 hr each

• System design, Excalidraw / live whiteboarding, 1 hr

• Behavioral / hiring manager, Q&A style interview, 1 hr

• AI proficiency, screen share with Claude Code or Cursor, 1 hr

Additional rounds I saw at startups / VC companies:

• Debugging interview, 1 hr

• Product engineer interview, 1 hr

• Take home assessment, time varies

When I started interview prepping I don’t think I was able to do LeetCode easys without lots of road blocks, and could not complete any LeetCode mediums. For system design, I could do high level designs for basic systems, however, anything more and I’d shit the bed. Here’s some deep dives into how I prepped for the popular interview types you’ll see most places now:

Coding

To prep for the coding portion, I paid for LeetCode Premium which is around $100. And then I paid for LeetCode’s Interview Crash Course for Data Structures and Algorithms which I believe is also around $100. The course is extremely thorough, but honestly took me at least 200 hours to get through. Because I was on an extremely tight timeline, I was doing prep ~8-12 hours a day for almost 3 weeks. It was absolutely brutal tbh.

I’d say I focused mostly on hashmaps, graphs, and tree problems, because these are what I was mostly asked in the interviews. I would spend maybe 20 minutes attempting a problem, and if I couldn’t figure out a path forward, I just watched a YouTube video on how to do it. Then I’d do it again myself. And then the next day, I’d do it again to make sure I got it down. If I didn’t, then I marked it in my tracker to redo again the next day. The tracker was just a Google Sheet where I logged every problem, whether I solved it, and if I needed to revisit it.

System Design

For this I used Hello Interview. It’s a website that has a bunch of system design courses. The guy gives you a format on how to answer the system design interview. It kinda goes: functional requirements, non-functional requirements, API definitions, high level entities for DB schema, then a component diagram, and then after, deep dives into how you’re going to meet your non-functional requirements.

In the interview I mainly focused on always hitting my functional requirements first and then meeting my non-functional requirements by further evolving the system via some sort of optimization, such as implementing some queue system or like a WebSocket. To prepare I did a bunch of the premade system design interview questions on Hello Interview. If I got stuck I watched the video on how they did it, and then I redid it again myself the next day to make sure I absorbed the info.

For companies I was interviewing for, I asked an LLM to generate me hard questions they could potentially ask me. For example, for my interview with Airtable, I practiced questions like: “Design me a system that given a table with over 1 million records, and a column’s formula changes, how to efficiently update all the cells in that column.” This was actually a very similar question I got asked in my real interview which was fire.

Hiring Manager / Recruiter / Behavioral

What I did for this was basically sat down and wrote like a 6 page doc of everything I could think of from my tenure at Amazon. Everything from niche technical problems to mentoring others to interview taking, blah blah. This allowed me to kind of really think through everything I did.

Then what I did was took my biggest takeaways and most impressive projects and explained them in bullet format so I could use it as a reference during the interview. For my work at Amazon I chose one backend project and one frontend project. I kind of followed this script: state the problem and pain points, state what my solution was, what I owned in the solution, and key metrics, like this resulted in X or Y or Z, to make it impressive. I also noted some stuff I could’ve done differently in case they asked me this as a follow up.

In the recruiter interview you’re gonna have to give this overview to them. In the hiring manager interview you’ll probably have to do the same, but this time they’ll probably challenge you more technically and ask you deeper dives. They’ll maybe also ask you about handling incidents, handling issues with coworkers or disputes, etc.

AI Interview

For this you’ll have to use something like Cursor or Claude Code and build something. Then you gotta explain to the interviewer how you’re reviewing the AI written code, edge cases, etc. Tbh this interview is easy but super easy to mess up too. They want to make sure you’re using the AI to help speed you up but that you also understand everything the AI is doing and that you catch errors in code review. This is more of a code review interview. Just do some personal projects to get used to it if you’ve never used these tools.

My Process

My first interview was on Dec 2 and my entire process concluded on Jan 16. In between, I did 49 interviews. I scheduled all my interviews before work hours, and for onsites I took PTO. From all these interviews I received 4 offers:

• From an early stage YC startup

• From a Series C startup that recently raised ~$100M, valued at ~$500M

• Brex, a fintech company recently bought out by Capital One

• Airtable, late stage / pre-IPO tech company

I probably applied to ~500 applications. I don’t know the exact amount, but every morning before interview prep I’d open LinkedIn and apply to another 15-20 applications.

I won’t get super into the numbers, but my offer ended up resulting in a 32% total compensation increase and a 46% base compensation increase. My highest offer would’ve resulted in a 60% base compensation increase, but I did not take this one. They were expecting around 70 hour work weeks and I’d have to be in office 3 days a week, where my new role I am remote but have the option to go to the office any day of the week. I also get free lunch which is nice. Also, private company comp which is pre-IPO is mostly paper money which you cannot realize until a later date. I felt that Airtable was better positioned for me to liquidate my equity sooner rather than later. Also the product I’d be working on I wasn’t so passionate about, and I liked how at Airtable I was working directly on the frontend customers interact with every day. Mainly I was looking for more WLB for my first year in NYC.

As for the startups, I was just looking for a more structured environment. Going from big tech to a smaller company (Airtable is only 800 employees, only 250 full time eng employees) is already a huge change. So much more ownership and change in the way you work and think. I think my next step would be a seed / Series A startup but I didn’t want to make that big of a jump and sacrifice other things I really value in life like fitness, social life, hobbies, and passions. Maybe when I’m more settled and less outside I’ll hop on the startup wave.

Takeaways

Recruiting is basically a full time job if you really are looking for a new gig. If I didn’t grind this out there’s no way I would’ve been able to move by our lease deadline (March 16th). I was basically focusing on this 24/7 for that month and a half. I had exhausted most of my PTO at work to do this.

With AI, software engineering is rapidly evolving. If you are not an exceptional engineer (or at least interviewee), you’ll have a very tough time. Before, you could pass maybe a few LeetCode rounds and call it a day. However now with AI, engineers are expected to be more high level. Think of yourself now as not only a software engineer but also a product engineer. You have to design the most efficient systems. You have to be able to own product features end to end with ease. You have to demonstrate that you’re technically sound but also can take advantage of AI tooling to accelerate your workflow.

I’m not a cracked engineer whatsoever, or just cracked in general lol. But you gotta convince the interviewer you are. At my new place all my colleagues are cracked af 😭😭 I don’t know how I made it here lol.

This was the greatest lock in I ever had. When I tell you I was locked in… I was fkin LOCKED IN. I didn’t go out, cancelled all my Hinge dates, etc. But I did it and so can anyone else. I hope this helps someone else 🙏🏽