Asanas mission is to “empower teams to do great things together. It’s easy to see why Asana is one of the best places for software engineers to work. They value things like teamwork and clear, direct communication.
Asana’s software engineer interview process is known to focus on specific ideas like object-oriented programming. It also includes a full two-hour coding exercise to see how qualified you are for the job.
Learn more about the Asana software engineer interview and how to do well in it in this guide. Download it now to get that Asana software engineer job.
A typical Asana software engineer interview goes through four steps: a recruiter screen, a technical phone screen, an on-site interview, and a reference check.
The recruiter’s phone screen is pretty simple; they mostly ask questions about your resume and how well you fit the role of software engineer. The recruiter may ask about your interests, your past experiences, and why you want to work at Asana. During this call, the recruiter can answer any questions you have about the interview process.
You don’t need to prepare much for this one. Look over your resume and talk from it. Also, learn more about Asana, like what their company mission is.
A software engineer at Asana will call you and ask you a technical question for an hour. This is the technical phone interview. The technical phone screen questions are usually a bit less in-depth, but they can be about any of the types of questions we’ll talk about next. Usually, this phone screen will involve an object-oriented design problem, which Asana emphasizes more than other companies.
The last thing Asana does before making an offer is to get two references: one from a manager and one from a peer.
Asanas software engineering interviews generally break down into the following three categories. The Exponent community says that Asana focuses a lot on object-oriented design problems, so make sure to talk about these in your interview preparation.
Asana’s coding interview is a two-hour coding test where they will ask you to answer coding questions in the language and editor of your choice. The focus of these interviews is on how you solve the problems, not on grammar mistakes or how much you know about the subject (you can use online resources during the exercises).
How you think about the problem is very important here, and you need to explain your steps more than you would in a normal coding assignment or exercise. Asana wants to see that you can carefully think through the problem and show that you know a lot about engineering. At the end of the interview, an engineer will sit down with you to talk through your solutions. This is a great chance to talk about not only what you coded but also the mistakes and trade-offs you thought about as you worked on the problem. Self-awareness of your own codes weaknesses and strengths is a big plus to the interviewer.
The best way to prepare for these interviews is to practice coding problems. You can start with our database of recently asked software engineer interview questions.
With over 100,000 customers worldwide, Asana has become one of the leading work management platforms, enabling teams to track projects, manage workflows, and hit deadlines collaboratively As a fast-growing SaaS company, Asana is constantly on the lookout for talented software engineers to join their fully remote teams.
Landing an engineering role at Asana requires thorough preparation as their interview process is rigorous, spanning multiple rounds of technical and behavioral discussions. This article provides an in-depth look at what to expect during the Asana software engineer interview along with sample questions and answers to help you prepare.
Overview of Asana’s Software Engineer Interview Process
The typical steps in Asana’s software engineering interview process are:
- Initial screening call with a recruiter
- Take-home coding assignment
- 2-3 technical rounds focused on coding and system design
- Behavioral and culture-fit discussions
- Final round with VP/Director of Engineering
The process aims to evaluate both your technical abilities through hands-on coding tests as well as your cognitive skills, collaboration style, and alignment with Asana’s values. Expect questions that probe your expertise across data structures, algorithms, object-oriented programming, and system architecture
Let’s look at some of the most common interview questions asked at Asana for software engineering roles
Technical Questions
Q1: How would you design a URL shortening service like Bitly?
Tips to answer:
- Discuss requirements like generating and looking up short URLs, tracking click data, etc.
- Propose high-level components like web server, ID generator, datastore for URL mappings, etc.
- Explain how key aspects like performance, scalability and availability influence your design
- Provide details around APIs, datastore schema, caching, load balancing, etc.
Q2: Given a stream of numbers, find the median efficiently in real-time.
Tips to answer:
- Clarify if stream is sorted or not and any constraints on memory
- Discuss using a min-heap and max-heap to track lower and upper half of stream
- Explain how maintaining balanced heaps allows efficient insert and extract median
- Analyze time and space complexities of this approach
Q3: Design a system like Dropbox to sync files across devices.
Tips to answer:
- Outline core requirements like storing files, syncing updated files, notifications, etc.
- Propose high-level architecture – client app, metadata datastore, file storage, etc.
- Discuss key aspects like security, large file handling, offline sync, etc.
- Provide details around APIs, protocols, caching, consistency models, etc.
Q4: Given a list of words, find all anagrams efficiently.
Tips to answer:
- Ask clarifying questions like word lengths, charset, any constraints on time/space
- Discuss using a hash table to group words by sorted characters as keys
- Explain benefits of this approach – easy grouping of anagrams, O(N) time complexity
- Code this up in your preferred language, discussing optimizations and tradeoffs
Q5: Design a ride sharing service like Uber.
Tips to answer:
- Identify key functionality like rider requests, driver matching, pricing, payments etc.
- Propose high-level architecture – mobile apps, trip datastore, user profiles, mapping APIs etc.
- Discuss important challenges like real-time matching, location tracking, failover, surge pricing etc.
- Provide details around technologies for messaging, load balancing, caching, etc.
Coding Questions
Q1: Reverse a singly linked list iteratively and recursively.
Tips to answer:
- Write out the iterative and recursive algorithms clearly
- Explain your approach, focusing on solving it in-place
- Analyze time and space complexity of both solutions
- Code it up in your strongest language and walk through test cases
Q2: Check if a binary tree is a valid BST.
Tips to answer:
- Outline a recursive solution to validate BST property at each node
- Discuss keeping min/max allowed values at each tree level to check nodes
- Code up the solution and highlight edge cases like NULL nodes
- Analyze time complexity as O(N) to visit each node once
Q3: Find the kth largest element in a binary search tree.
Tips to answer:
- Explain a recursive reverse in-order traversal to count nodes
- Discuss keeping global count and returning node once count = k
- Code up solution in language of choice, handling edge cases
- Analyze time complexity as O(H+k) where H is tree height
Q4: Check if a string is a palindrome.
Tips to answer:
- Explain a two-pointer approach comparing start and end indicies moving inward
- Handle edge cases like empty string input
- Code up efficient solution in chosen language and test with examples
- Analyze linear time and constant space complexity
Q5: Find the intersection of two sorted arrays.
Tips to answer:
- Discuss using two indices to traverse both arrays comparing elements
- Return common elements by saving to a hash table to handle duplicates
- Code up solution, check edge cases like differing array sizes
- Analyze O(M+N) time complexity and O(M) space used
System Design Questions
Q1: Design a social network like Facebook – core features and architecture.
Tips to answer:
- Outline core use cases – profiles, news feed, posts, comments, search, timelines etc.
- Propose high-level architecture – web/mobile clients, application layer, object storage, databases, caching, etc.
- Discuss challenges like large scale, real-time updates, news feed generation, etc.
Q2: Design YouTube or Netflix – core features and scalable architecture.
Tips to answer:
- Discuss core use cases like video uploads, encoding, recommendations, streaming, etc.
- Propose building blocks – CDN for caching, transcoding pipeline, metadata DB, stream delivery service, etc.
- Focus on scalability challenges like high read/write loads, low latency for video delivery, etc.
Q3: Design a distributed logging system like ELK stack.
Tips to answer:
- Outline requirements for high volumes of log data – collection, storage, analysis, monitoring, alerts etc.
- Propose architecture with log shippers, message queue, stream processor, and datastore
- Focus on data partitioning, replicas, and load balancing for scalability
Q4: Design a caching system like Redis.
Tips to answer:
- Discuss cache requirements like O(1) reads/writes, eviction policies, persistence, replication etc.
- Propose components like hash table for in-memory data, linked list for LRU eviction, etc.
- Focus on high availability, data sharding, lazy updates, etc.
Q5: Design Google Docs for collaborative editing.
Tips to answer:
- Identify core use cases like real-time multi-user editing, comments, versioning, etc.
- Discuss components – client, document service, operational transform, concurrency control, etc.
- Focus on challenges like document representation, change merging, conflict resolution etc.
Behavioral and Leadership Questions
Q1: Tell me about a time you influenced a team member’s opinion during a project.
Tips to answer:
- Share a specific example that highlights communication, empathy, and influence skills
- Discuss how you understood their perspective before explaining your reasoning
- Share the outcome and how the project benefited from this interaction
Q2: Describe a challenging engineering problem you solved recently.
Tips to answer:
- Illustrate your problem-solving approach with a complex technical challenge
- Discuss how you analyzed root causes, devised solutions, and validated results
- Share any creative thinking that led to an optimal solution
Q3: How do you balance perfectionism with pragmatic solutions?
Tips to answer:
- Share your approach to balancing ideal solutions and business constraints
- Give an example of launching an MVP version first and iterating
- Discuss focusing on critical use cases and expanding scope later
Q4: How do you stay updated with the latest tech advancements?
Tips to answer:
- Share resources you leverage like publications, podcasts, conferences etc.
- Discuss how you experiment with new technologies through side projects
- Give examples of how you’ve applied cutting-edge tech to deliver results
Q5: How do you mentor or coach junior engineers on your team?
Tips to answer:
- Share your approach to mentoring such as leading by example, being approachable etc.
- Discuss strategies like knowledge sharing sessions, code reviews, hackathons etc.
- Give examples highlighting your commitment to developing engineers
How to Prepare for the Asana Software Engineer Interview
Here are some tips to prepare effectively for your Asana software engineering interview:
-
Study Asana’s architecture – Understand how Asana works at a high level. Review their engineering blog and tech talks to learn more about their tech stack.
-
Practice coding – Refresh data structures and algorithms and practice coding challenging problems. Focus on speed and code quality.
-
Prepare for system design – Study architectural principles and practice designing large-scale systems likeweb apps, APIs, databases, etc.
-
Review your projects – Brush up on technical details of your past work
Technical Design: Simple and Robust
When it comes to system design interviews, can you explain to the interviewer how you use clarity and simplicity to solve hard problems?
Algorithms and Data Structures
Asana emphasizes data structures problems in their algorithms & data structures questions. Be sure to review concepts like hash tables and linked lists before your interview. Asana suggests knowing the different types of operations that can be used on each data structure and how long they take to run.
One way to shine in these interviews is to always mention and consider edge cases. Is there a really bad “worst-case” situation for one of the data structures? How might one data structure work better if we assume the input data is already sorted? Asking these kinds of questions and “zooming out” to think about the bigger effects of the choices you make will help you do better in the interview.
To get ready for these interviews, you should go over the modules on data structures and algorithms in our software engineering course again and use our interview question database to practice data structures questions.
Asanas software engineer design interview questions can be hard because they require you to break down real-life problems into small parts. Asana says that when you answer these questions, you should try to keep things as simple as possible. Don’t make your answer too complicated; instead, focus on making the problem as clear as possible and then showing a clear and concise way to move forward.
Watching practice system design interviews like this one on Facebook’s news feed and answering practice system design questions from our interview question database are the best ways to get ready for system design interviews.
Asana looks at the following non-exhaustive categories to evaluate candidates.
