Typical phone screen with recruiter, then technical phone screen. On-site with 6 interviews (panel of 2 each), 1 was a lunch interview. The recruiter was responsive to emails, and scheduling was handled well.
The interview questions were not especially difficult, BST, Graph problems, system design, etc.
Do yourself a favor and read other people's experiences interviewing with this company. You might think you did well, but there's a good chance you will get rejected. They won't give any reason why, and I guess that makes sense. You most likely need to stand out compared to the standard answers that they hear, especially for a senior level role.
The company values culture just as much as technical proficiency, so make sure that you fit that mold before applying as well.
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Tableau Software
Interview
The process and questions are pretty typical as with many other software companies (1 phone interview + 4 on-site interviews).
Questions were actually not difficult (select top frequent words, tweaked questions on binary (search) trees, etc.) when compared with the Google or FB interviews.
My main problem was that the recruiter matched me to the wrong team. At the onsite interview, we found out the mismatch after just first few sentences. What the team members said about their job's responsibilities are different from what I heard from my recruiter. The team was looking for some specific skills (low-level infrastructure coding, etc.) while I expected some "general" interviews.
We decided to process the interviews anyway as scheduled but it's kinda very boring and not engaging at all when we pretty much decided "not a good fit". Maybe, because of that, questions I received were pretty straight forward and simple from the first to the last guys.
Yes, they are like mini-Microsoft company with all people I met were ex-Microsoft and the culture is very heavy PM-oriented. They tried to sell that they were very cool and enthusiastic but I didn’t feel that at all.
Receive "Thank you for your time" as expected.
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Tableau Software
Interview
Bias against older candidates. Concern regarding lack of older employees and bias toward “Microsoft style” hiring is mentioned in reviews posted by employees. My interview experience is consistent with those observations, although I had not read those before interviewing. The interview team and Director did poorly on teamwork / work environment focused questions that I asked.
Phone interviews were very standard. The “Homework” assignment was seemingly trivial, but contained a “trick” to trip up less experienced candidates.
The team I was interviewing for was working on a not-yet-released version of their product, which was at a beta level, but not posted for download yet. They were distributing the beta so I asked the phone interviewer if they could send me a copy, but he said no (more about this below).
The onsite interview was very disorganized. The HR person was a no-show, so I waited in the lobby until the first technical session, which was delayed. All technical segments were conducted with 2 interviewers. The lead interviewer scheduled for the first session was also not available, so they hurriedly found someone else, who obviously had insufficient time to review my background. The coding questions asked in the first session did not seem to be appropriate for my experience level, probably because the interviewer did not have time to prepare. I remained cheerful and upbeat during the session, but that actually seemed to irritate the lead interviewer. He seemed annoyed that he had to interview me on short notice, and it showed.
The second session was also all coding. Lunch with two team members was next but again, one of the scheduled (a manager) was not available, so they found another person to fill in. Both were junior staff which was fine, but they seemed a bit uncomfortable at first (especially the replacement). Lunchtime discussion was mainly informal, but I decided to ask about the beta version of the product. They said it had been packaged as a ‘public’ beta and would be no problem to send to candidates. They even seemed surprised no one sent it to me already. This was a concerning inconsistency. I did not revel to them that I had asked for it but was told ‘no’ by the phone interviewer.
Another technical session followed lunch. Yet again, there was a change but the manager originally scheduled for lunch joined this session. The other interviewer was the same person who conducted the phone interviewer. He was not a pleasant person at all. The questions at this last session were pointless because they were just more “trick” questions. Also, the interview team did not work together well during this session.
Note: My interview was months ago.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Nothing specific, except most questions were not effective.