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I'm currently an Engineering Manager at Skutopia looking after our Shipping Platform product vertical.
I'm working to scale our engineering teams, give our current engineers the skills to be our future leaders, as well as promoting a positive culture where we can all learn, develop, and grow.
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At Skutopia, we try to have a short and efficient interview process to enable you to get a decision on your future quickly. Not only that, we don’t believe in wasting time if we believe you are a good fit for the company. The speed at which we get through the process is largely driven by the candidate's availability. Let's take a look at each stage of the process.
Who: Engineering Managers or Talent Acquisition
Time: 30 minutes
The screen is our initial introduction to each other. We learn more about your background, career aspirations, whether you desire to be more frontend or more backend, and start to gauge where you fit in our engineering levels. We will give you an overview of our three product verticals:
As well as touch on our technical stack. You can find more information in our public technology strategy.
We also seek to form alignment on salary expectations. We don't believe in wasting each others time if we get to an offer that isn't compatible.
If you're applying for an IC4 or higher role, read on to the Lead Interview. If you are applying for IC1, IC2, or IC3 skip down to the Take Home Challenge.
Who: Two Engineer Managers
Time: 45 minutes
The lead interview is around how you work as a technical leader. While there is no people leadership as such in these roles, there is a lot of influence from a technical point of view. Therefore we need to validate how you work in that regard.
Leading a squad or a vertical is a challenging place with many different priorities and often a lot of desire from the business to get something new and shiny to our customers. Sometimes as engineers we need to push those back to get our house in order. This is a challenging skill to master, but one that is so critical to the success of an engineering organisation.
Not only that, but as a lead, you will be seen as a mentor for engineers who are earlier in their career. Being able to share some of your wisdom with them helps the whole organisation succeed.
We have attempted to do something a little bit different with our take home challenge. We don't want you to build a project from scratch that might have no bearing on how we write software at Skutopia.
For our take home challenge, we have written an API that contains two endpoints, your goal is to add a third endpoint. This gives you some flavour for the way in which we write code, and gives you a chance to understand our patterns before joining.
The implementation isn't over difficult to understand from a code point of view, and we don't want you to spend a ton of time writing code.
Where we do want to see some time spent is on the improvements.md file. This is your chance to show off and jot down all of the things that you think could be done better in the codebase if you were to make this a production application. This is your chance to go broad and show off your skills. The improvements could be wide ranging touching on, for example, the code, monitoring and observability, cicd, infra, system design, security, and beyond.
Who: Engineering Manager + An Engineer
Time: 60 minutes
The first part of the tech interview will focus on your take home challenge. We will get you to do a screen share and talk us through your solution and how you went about it.
We will get you to go through each of your improvements and expand upon the thoughts that you have, and naturally have discussions around them. We may even challenge you to see how you would get buy in for certain decisions.
The second part of the interview we will jump into Excalidraw and do a pair whiteboard exercise to design a system together. Don't feel you're all alone being watched, this is your chance to ask questions and work with us to get to a solution. This gives us valuable insight into how you work with other engineers. There are many different ways to solve problems so we might do some iteration and improvements along the way.
Depending on where we get to we will move into general questions around technology. A lot of the time this is us exploring the limits of your knowledge, and the breadth of your exposure. It's completely fine to say you don't know an answer.
We will aim to leave you at least 10 minutes for questions of your own. Make sure you come with those burning questions and make this a two way interview.
At this stage this is the final round if you are applying for an IC1, IC2, or IC3 engineering role with us. The round is broken down into two parts and we will schedule these back to back.
Engineering
Who: Engineer Manager + An Engineer
Time: 30 minutes
This round is not a technical round, but rather a ways of working round. Think about everything you do day to day that is not writing code. You're presented with problems, or helping others. We will be assessing you on how you integrate into our engineer teams.
Product, Design & People
Who: Product Manager + Product Designer + People Team
Time: 30 minutes
This round is around how you like to work with your key stakeholders within your team, and general questions around the culture fit we are looking for with our engineers.
Product, Design & People
Who: Product Manager + Product Designer + People Team
Time: 30 minutes
This round is around how you like to work with your key stakeholders within your team, and general questions around the culture fit we are looking for with our engineers.