Hi, I’m Lizzie Siegle, and this was my experience as an intern at PubNub this summer…
Imagine having routine one-on-one’s with engineers, evangelists, and even the CTO and CEO of your company. It’s not usually the case, but this summer I was lucky enough to be around smart, passionate people who were willing to give their time for free. This post details my experience over the past three months as a summer intern for PubNub.
Since August 2015, I had been interviewing for summer internships. I found the PubNub job when a PubNub fan I followed on Twitter tweeted about it in late January 2016. I sent in my application online, followed a few other PubNub users on Twitter, and then talked to them on social media.
My first interview came about a month later. It was a video call with two developer evangelists and was pretty conversational. They asked me about myself, my school, my past projects, why I wanted to work at PubNub, and what I thought about talking to developers about the company.
The second one was with Josh, the technical marketing manager. When I saw his YouTube video about the history of developer evangelism, I was scared to show off my Computer Science skills. I was amazed at how much I learned about evangelism just from those interviews! It was a little more technical, but still very behavioral.
My third and final interview was with Stephen, PubNub’s co-founder and CTO. This was the most difficult of the three, so I watched most of PubNub’s YouTube videos to get ready for it. Especially ones where he did demos. I showed him two hackathon projects on my GitHub and talked about my code, how I thought about them, what I learned, what I used, the hard parts, and more. I only remember asking him a lot of questions about himself and PubNub during that interview.
Looking back, these interviews were more behavioral than other interviews I have had. Why? Because evangelists need to be able to teach, communicate with, and relate to other developers.
A few months after I applied, Stephen tweeted at me, “yo!” There were a lot of people from PubNub who followed me back. One also DM’d me a congratulations, which made it even more official. It became “official official” a few days later, in the form of an email.
On my first day, I had a bunch of meetings with different managers and executives who were in charge of new hires and interns. Some full-timers were in my meeting, like the new Head of DevOps, a core engineer, and another intern. Not everyone was in every meeting, though. Some of the things that managers talked about were company values, the office hierarchy, benefits, gear, laptops, lockers, sick days/vacations, desks, who to ask questions of or who to go to for help, and so on. It was sort of overwhelming, but still very welcoming at the same time.
Getting hired at a leading real-time stream network like PubNub is no easy task. With its innovative technology powering over 70 billion messages per month for thousands of end-users worldwide, PubNub only recruits the best of the best.
As a prospective PubNub employee, you can expect a rigorous interview process designed to evaluate your skills and problem-solving abilities In this highly competitive job market, thorough preparation is key to standing out from the crowd.
To help you get interview-ready, I’ve compiled the 15 most common PubNub interview questions based on extensive research. With insights from authentic interview experiences and expert tips, you’ll gain the knowledge needed to ace your PubNub interview
PubNub Company Overview
Let’s start with a quick rundown of PubNub’s history and achievements:
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Founded in 2010 and headquartered in San Francisco, PubNub powers real-time applications through its global Data Stream Network infrastructure
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PubNub’s platform handles over 2 trillion messages per month across 70+ countries worldwide.
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PubNub serves thousands of customers globally, including big names like Peloton, Coinbase, and DoorDash.
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PubNub has received multiple awards, including the Best IoT Platform Award and Most Innovative Tech Company Award.
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PubNub raised over $120 million in funding and has grown to 500+ employees.
Working at PubNub means joining a team of innovators at the cutting edge of real-time technology. The interview will assess your ability to keep up with and contribute to this high-growth environment.
Now, let’s get into the top 15 interview questions:
1. What is your experience designing scalable systems? How do you ensure reliability and performance?
Handling massive scale is PubNub’s specialty, so this question tests your proficiency in building systems capable of immense, dynamic growth. Interviewers want to know that you can develop solutions optimized for scalability from the ground up.
In your response, discuss your experience selecting technologies like microservices and highlight examples where your systems gracefully handled large fluctuations in traffic. Emphasize the monitoring, testing, and optimization strategies you’ve used to maintain speed, stability, and uptime at scale. Outline how you gather usage insights to continuously improve architecture and infrastructure. Share specific metrics like reduced latency, increased transactions per second, or percentage uptime that quantify the success of your scalable designs.
2. Tell us about a successful marketing campaign you designed. How did you measure its impact?
With this question, interviewers evaluate your ability to create high-performing marketing strategies and quantitatively measure their effectiveness. Discuss the campaign’s goals and your process for identifying the target audience. Explain the multi-channel tactics you used and highlight innovative or creative elements that drove engagement.
Provide specific metrics that prove the campaign’s success, like percentage lift in product trials, increased site traffic and conversions, or growth in referral sign-ups. Use real data to showcase how you accurately tracked performance and optimized based on data insights. Your response should demonstrate strategic thinking, analytical skills, and the ability to directly impact growth.
3. Walk us through a complex architectural decision you made. What was the outcome?
PubNub seeks engineers who can make sound architectural choices, so expect questions testing your decision-making process. Use a real example to illustrate how you weighed alternatives and selected the best design to meet functional and business needs. Explain technical factors like system coupling, cohesion, and trade-offs.
Discuss how you involved stakeholders and got team buy-in. Share quantifiable results like reduced debugging time, faster feature delivery, or improved stability that demonstrate the positive impact of your architectural design. This showcases your technical expertise along with soft skills like communication, collaboration, and leadership.
4. Describe a time you successfully converted a lead into a customer. What sales strategies did you use?
PubNub places immense value on skilled sales professionals who can strategically convert leads. Use a specific example to detail the prospect’s needs and how you tailored your pitch to address their pain points. Discuss tactics like persistent but personalized follow-up, interactive demos, relevant case studies, and conveying competitive advantages.
Highlight your consultative approach focused on problem-solving versus pure promotion. Share data reflecting your track record of successful conversions to quantify your sales abilities. This response should demonstrate communication skills, customer focus, persistence, and strategic thinking.
5. How do you set technical direction for engineering teams? How do you measure outcomes?
This question checks your competence in leading engineering teams and executing complex technical projects. Discuss your experience with Agile, Scrum, or other development frameworks and how you’ve customized processes to maximize team productivity.
Explain your methodology for setting objectives and monitoring progress through OKRs, story point tracking, or other quantifiable metrics. Provide examples of how you’ve successfully aligned engineering efforts with business goals. Your response should showcase both technical leadership and business acumen.
6. What techniques have you used to drive consistent revenue growth?
Sustaining consistent revenue growth is crucial for any business. PubNub wants leaders who have proven methods for expanding revenue streams. Discuss data-driven sales and marketing tactics you’ve applied, like expanding share of wallet with existing accounts or leveraging cross-selling opportunities.
Highlight techniques like account-based marketing that maximize customer lifetime value. Quantify results where possible by sharing metrics like year-over-year sales growth, increased customer retention rates, or growth in average order value. This demonstrates your strategic abilities to systematically grow revenues.
7. Share an example of how you optimized operations to improve efficiency without compromising quality.
This question tests your skill in streamlining processes while maintaining excellence. Use a specific example to detail inefficient workflows you’ve improved through automation, technology, or process redesign. Quantify results such as percentage reductions in costs or errors.
Discuss quality assurance measures you implemented in parallel to ensure optimization efforts upheld standards. Emphasize how you balanced business needs like cost or time savings with customer needs like functionality and user experience. Your response should showcase strategic operational improvements that positively impacted the bottom line.
8. Tell us about a time you successfully troubleshot a complex system outage. What was the root cause?
PubNub deals with mission-critical systems where outages can have major consequences, so expect questions gauging your troubleshooting abilities. Walk through a specific example, outlining how you quickly identified the issue’s root cause through system monitoring, log analysis, and other diagnostic steps.
Discuss technical details like software bugs, hardware failures, or infrastructure weaknesses that caused the outage. Explain how you resolved the problem and implemented improvements to prevent reoccurrence. Your response should demonstrate technical expertise along with problem-solving skills and grace under pressure.
9. What strategies do you use when reaching out to potential new customers? How do you initially engage them?
Mastering customer acquisition is key for any growing company like PubNub. This question tests your ability to effectively attract and engage new prospects. Discuss tactics like personalized outreach based on thorough research of the prospect’s business and needs.
Highlight how you craft tailored value propositions addressing their unique pain points versus using generic templates. Provide examples of content or interactive tools you’ve used to capture interest. Emphasize that your goal is starting meaningful conversations versus hard-selling immediately. Your response should convey strategic relationship-building skills.
10. How do you build rapport and tailor your messaging when engaging potential customers?
Building meaningful connections with customers is vital for sales success. Discuss your process of researching prospects to understand their industries, challenges, and goals. Explain how you customize pitches by highlighting PubNub features or services that directly address each customer’s needs.
Share examples of tailoring messaging for different customer personas, like technical users versus business executives. Highlight soft skills like active listening, communicating sincerely, and focusing conversations on problem-solving versus promoting features. Demonstrate your ability to establish authentic rapport with diverse customers.
11. How do you prioritize product features based on customer needs and engineering resources?
PubNub operates in highly competitive markets, so prioritizing product features strategically is crucial. Discuss processes like gathering customer feedback and reviewing market trends to identify must-have versus nice-to-have features.
Explain quantitative prioritization frameworks you’ve used to rank features objectively based on customer value versus engineering effort. Provide real examples of how you’ve had to make tough trade-off decisions on feature prioritization and how you communicated rationale to stakeholders. Your response should demonstrate customer focus, analytical abilities, and leadership skills.
12. Tell us about a challenging cross-functional project you managed. How did you coordinate across teams?
PubNub needs leaders who can manage complex initiatives spanning multiple teams. Use a real example to detail how you facilitated collaboration through tools like shared project trackers, status meetings, and clear documentation.
Discuss challenges like misaligned priorities across departments and how you overcame them to keep the project on track. Share quantifiable metrics that prove the project’s success, like launching on time within budget. Highlight soft skills like communication, empathy, accountability, and influencing without authority.
13. Share examples of how you’ve used automation to increase productivity. What results did you achieve?
Automation expertise is
The Work of an Intern
This, along with the next section, was the best part. I enjoy hackathons because I can make anything I want. That’s what we evangelists did this summer (as long as our projects used PubNub in some way).
Some projects I worked on included:
- Project EON from PubNub was used to make a web data visualization of tweets about the Warriors.
- This is an Android app that uses the Pokemon Go API to show you Pokemon that are nearby (it uses PubNub for push notifications on Android).
- An iPhone app that used the Raspberry Pi to flash LED lights at different speeds based on your heart rate and showed your heart rate on an EON chart (which it got from the Apple Watch app that went with it). It also came with a way to log in and tweet about progress with Twitter Fabric.
- With EON charts and different colors on a map of the US, this web app showed how people felt about the candidates for the upcoming presidential election (shoutout to Josh for all his work on the project).
It was super neat to work across different platforms and dabble with hardware for the first time. We were encouraged to take ownership of each project, and also to try something new. Mentorship, support, and help were given by engineers and evangelists in and out of the office, not just with projects but with almost everything!
I didn’t expect it to take as long as it did to make the app, clean up and optimize the code, merge with GitHub (ugh), write the blog post, get it published on WordPress, do SEO, plan a workshop or talk, practice the workshop or talk…but it was fun, and developers of all levels do it.
At the end of each project, there was a blog post with a PubNub use case and tutorial to teach and inspire other developers. All of the projects were fun, but some were hard and annoying to work on. Some bugs kept me up until three in the morning. It was times like those that made me wonder if I could be an engineer. But in the end, they made me really want to be one (and an evangelist). ).
Those problems made me a better developer. They were frustrating (and made me want to facepalm), but they also energized me and reminded me why I started programming in the first place. Problems arose from git, IDEs, one small line change… anything. The hunt was a part of the challenge, and this summer, my love of the challenge came back. Everything about PubNub—the people I worked with, the work itself, the challenges, the culture—made me happy at the end of the day (or the beginning of the morning).
Though teaching others how to use PubNub is a part of evangelism, there are other ways to get them excited about the product. We attended local meetups (#SFHTML5, Women who Code, and many more) held at other San Francisco companies (such as Airbnb, Yelp, Slack, Google SF, and more). Attending meetups were not always about networking — for me, they were about learning from the talks, speakers, and other attendees, and getting PubNub’s name out. I found that I enjoy talking about PubNub and what we do here. Also, giving so many elevator pitches improved my communication skills. It made me have to explain technical concepts in multiple ways to ensure comprehension.
Hosting a PubNub meetup
PubNub has been growing, and the office space does not reflect that. We used to host meetups every night, and then stopped when it got cramped. The office was very supportive when I wanted to host a small ping pong meetup one night.
It was stressful at first because not many people showed up, but the night got better as it went on. Stephen and the other workers at PubNub made everyone feel welcome, which is a big part of why I’ve called PubNub home this summer. I expect to see quite a few of those attendees applying for jobs at PubNub in the future!.
I helped lead a workshop on how to build a messaging app at a coding school in Fremont, and then led my own workshop at Spectra Hackathon, the Bay Area’s largest women’s hackathon. It was neat to teach others how to build a web app using PubNub. I also gave tech talks at meetups like #SFHTML5 at Google SF and WomEng Hear and Now at Square, spreading my passion for developer evangelism and using PubNub!
A group from Twitter’s Girls who Code program visited our SoMa headquarters to learn about PubNub. I gave them a tour of the office, gave a brief presentation on developer evangelism, and an overview of PubNub, and answered questions about college, hackathons, my internship, and what my experience has been like as a minority in tech. I remember being worried when I sent out the last-minute email blast that morning telling the office that these girls were coming.
That was silly, because the positive feedback was immediate. These sentiments were especially reflected by Todd, the CEO, who took the time to speak with the group!
The work was fun, rewarding, and challenging all at the same time. The interns got a lot of help and support from everyone, across all departments. A lot of other interns I’ve talked to at hackathons and other events agree that my work was some of the most fun they’ve had. Also, it made me happy when a friend told me she had just emailed the CTO a question and was talking to him for the first time. I laughed, thinking of myself talking to PubNub’s CTO everyday!.
How to Answer Behavioral Interview Questions Sample Answers
FAQ
How to answer tell us about yourself interview?
How to answer what’s important to you?
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What is important to me?
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Why?
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I want to make more money.
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I need to pay the bills and take care of my family.
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I want to stay healthy.
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I want be able to always provide for my family.
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I want to help the environment.
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I want my children to live in a clean community.
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