Who We Are

We are a global messaging platform based in Palo Alto, California, and were founded and funded by one of the first ten employees at Google. Our current team consists of TopCoders, ACM ICPC World Finalists, and medalists of the International Olympiads in Informatics. We work on challenging projects that we choose from the ground up that have direct impact on our 200-million monthly-active users.

How We Interview & Hire

Process Overview

1. Initial Phone Screen (Director of Recruiting)
2. Technical Phone Screen (Engineer)
3. Onsite (Engineer, CEO)

Initial Phone Screen

• Conducted over the phone by Daniel Thompson, Director of Recruiting
• The chat will last no longer than 30 minutes
• Expect general questions about your background, previous work experience, and career
goals
• He will explain more about the role, the team, and the company

Technical Phone Screen

• Conducted by an engineer
• The interview will last no longer than 1.5 hours
• The format is a phone call with a collaborative document for coding purposes (CoderPad)
• Talk through your thought process about the questions you are asked. The engineers are
evaluating not only your technical abilities but how you approach problems and how you
try to solve them
• Ask clarifying questions if you do not understand the problem or need more information.
Many of the questions asked in our interviews are deliberately underspecified because
our engineers are looking to see how you engage the problem. In particular, they are
looking to see which areas leap to your mind as the most important piece of the question
you’ve been presented
• Think about ways to improve the solution you’ll present. In many cases, the first answer
that comes to mind isn’t the most elegant solution and may need some refining. It’s
definitely worthwhile to talk about your initial thoughts to a question, but jumping
immediately into presenting a brute force solution will be received less well than taking
time to compose a more efficient solution
• Take some time to look on our website, try out the product, and familiarize
yourself with the team and some project ideas
 
Onsite Interview

• Conducted by an engineer
• The onsite will last no longer than 4 hours
• The first two hours are spent with one engineer going through similar problems
as the phone screen (white-boarding) and you’ll work through the implementation on a laptop
• The third hour is lunch with the team that you’ll be working with
• The fourth hour is an informal chat with Ralph Harik, CEO
• The interview is purely focused on coding, data structures, and algorithms
• It’s encouraged to brush up on DFS (depth-first search), BFS (breadth-first search),
memoization, and run time / logarithmic complexity

Feedback

• You will receive feedback from your phone interview by the end of the same day
• You will receive feedback from your onsite interview no later than 24 hours from completion