Tophatter makes mobile commerce fun. On our unique platform, buyers interact, chat, and purchase items from a wide variety of sellers. We've created a fun, engaging consumer shopping experience, with a focus on mobile. We're growing quickly and profitable with millions of dollars in transaction volume each week.

We're based in the bay area with offices in San Francisco and Shanghai. We're Series A funded by leading Silicon Valley venture capital firms. Our unique organizational structure culture favors context over control.

As an employee at Tophatter, you’ll receive a competitive compensation and benefits package including medical, dental, vision, life insurance, and unlimited vacation. We offer catered lunch daily via EAT Club, subsidized Equinox gym membership, and subsidized public transit/shuttle to make your commuting life easier.

Team

• We’re a team of 20 software engineers and are looking to add 10 more this year.
• We have team members with ties to Stanford, MIT, Y Combinator, Cornell, UIUC, and Berkeley, and our engineering managers have a rich history of leading successful startups. Our founders met as CS undergrads at Stanford.

How We Interview and Hire

• Learn more about the process, team, and culture on Medium here: https://medium.com/product-engineering-tophatter/interviewing-at-tophatter-aee5a76ae9ed

The Interview Process

• Our interview process is highly competitive. Fewer than 2% of candidates from the introductory call will receive an offer. We’ll provide as much guidance here to increase your odds of doing well — and we hope that you do well. We also recognize that interviewing is hard and there’s no perfect system for it. Feedback is always encouraged.

• How we do interviews might actually look familiar to you. Our process is modeled after Stripe. The idea of writing this and sharing it publicly is also inspired by Stripe.

Here’s the structure of the interview process:

1. Introductory call

• Length: 15–30 minutes.

2. Technical phone screen

• Length: 60 minutes. Takes place on Coderpad. We strongly suggest a dynamic language (JS, Ruby, Python).

3. Technical onsite

• Length: usually 4–5 hours. Takes place in our San Francisco office (185 Berry St).
  • Bug squash (60 mins)
  • Code refactor (60 mins)
  • Lunch break (30–45 mins)
  • Project (90 mins)
  • Culture fit & debrief (30 mins)

The Offer Process

• One thing that’s different about Tophatter is we’re able to quickly determine if we’re excited about you and move things forward. We could discuss compensation at the onsite and have the offer sent and signed before you leave. For that reason, it’s best to do as much research about us before the onsite. Please bring any questions or concerns and ask those either over lunch or at the debrief so that we have a chance to address those.

• We also can move slower if you want to wait until your other onsites are finished — but we almost never send an offer letter until you feel excited enough about us to sign it if you were to receive one. In either case, you shouldn’t feel pressured to make a decision. But we also don’t want to slow things down if you know you’re excited about us.