Top SingleStore Interview Questions and Answers to Prepare For

The front-end-focused development team at SingleStore works on a wide range of fun tasks to make the user experience of our product easier. In this blog post, we talk about how we hire engineers for this team.

single-stores-hiring-process-for-frontend-focused-engineersSingleStore’s Hiring Process for Frontend-Focused Engineers

We’re looking for front-end-focused software engineers right now, and I thought it would be a good idea to write about how we interview people. Not only will this help people who are interested in applying, but I also think it will help me get feedback on the process from people outside the company.

Disclaimer: some parts of this process are standardized at SingleStore, whereas other parts are specific to my team. This article is about both, so you’ll see me use both “I” and “we” before words. Finally, all of this is subject to change any moment since we iterate frequently on our hiring processes.

Let me start by giving you some background on our tech stack, what we do, and how we work together.

• We hire frontend-focused engineers across a couple of different teams. Our “Singlestore Helios Team” works on the control plane UI for SingleStore’s cloud service. This blog post is all about them. This UI has many parts, like an SQL IDE, a Query Plan visualizer, an activity monitoring dashboard, and other common administrative tools for managing users and clusters. Our frontend is not just a view layer. They are making a web app that does most of its work on the client. This is why the frontend is really complicated and has a lot of logic in it.
• We try to foster a culture of “full-stack engineering”. We hire engineers who work on both the front end and the back end, but everyone is encouraged to work on both.
• Our frontend technology stack is React/TypeScript. Our back end is written in Go, and GraphQL is how our front end talks to the back end. A lot of the information that our front end shows in the UI comes from SQL over WebSockets.

In terms of team process, were very distributed and work from many different time zones. This means that we prefer to hire people with strong written communication skills. At the moment, our interview process doesn’t test for this, but we’d like to add it one day.

In the same way, I don’t care where people live as long as they live in one of the countries where we can hire them (Portugal, the US, or the UK). However, we may sometimes try to balance the seniority of team members across time zones.

Next, I’ll talk about the whole interview process that happens after someone applies for one of our open jobs through our careers page.

The first step of the interview process is the application review by the hiring manager. I manually review every single resume that is submitted to our recruiting platform. I also make sure that anyone who isn’t a good fit or doesn’t meet the requirements gets an email telling them they didn’t get the job. This is really important since I consider “ghosting” to be a very poor practice from most tech companies. Also, as the person in charge of hiring, I believe it is very important to read all of the team applications.

In this stage, Im looking for:

• No matter if the candidate’s experience meets the job’s requirements or not. Sometimes we were looking for people with more experience, and sometimes we were looking for people with less experience. This will be made clear in the job description, and my job is to make sure the requirements are met.
• Any relevant experience to what we do at SingleStore. “Relevant” experience could mean having worked on an Interactive Development Environment (IDE) before if we were looking for people with a lot of experience. Being in this kind of situation could mean that I “ignore” one of the job requirements that isn’t met. I like reading resumes that are short and to the point. We accept cover letters and read them. I don’t really like cover letters or dislike them, and it’s up to the candidate to decide if they want to send one or not.

We conduct 2 interviews with all candidates that pass through the application review. Each interview is a one-hour technical exercise. We use Google Meet to conduct all of our interviews.

• The first interview is a technical programming task where you have to look at existing codebases and find ways to make them better.
• Building user interfaces with React and JavaScript is the focus of the second interview, which is a technical reading and writing task.

When we call candidates, we pair them with one or two engineers and test not only their technical skills but also how well they can talk to others. Certain things we look for are the ability to ask good questions and discuss trade offs. We try to schedule both interviews at once to minimize back and forths.

If these two phone interviews are successful, well advance them to the final round.

The final round of interviews is made up of four interviews. We try to schedule them in a single day or across two days depending on the candidates preference.

• An interview on UI and User Experience. We want to know how the candidates think about UI/UX and how much experience they have building user interfaces.
• Dealing with network requests in a client-side application was the focus of a technical programming exercise. This code should be written in JavaScript, but pseudocode will do.
• We want to see how well candidates understand the JavaScript execution model and event loop in this interview.
• A technical programming activity was all about using data structures to get a job done. This code should be written in JavaScript, but pseudocode is also fine. This interview is to see how well candidates can turn an algorithm into a working program.
• Two parts of a conversation with the hiring manager: talk about your past work, your career goals, and the culture of the team. The person who hired us talks about how the team works, what our plans are, and what our technical problems are. Anyone who is interested can ask any questions they want about the team, the product, the company, or how we make software.

• Some applicants are given a task to do at home to test their basic web development skills (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript). This is mostly what we do for summer internships or for people who don’t have a lot of experience with these technologies. This step would not replace any of the steps above.
• Before the “First Stage,” we might have a “Recruiter Phone Screen” or “Hiring Manager Screen.” The number changes based on the number of applicants we have.
• If we didn’t learn anything from our interview loop, we might need to do another interview. We avoid this as much as possible.

Interview: SingleStore at Dell Technologies World