I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Chewy (Boston, MA) in Jan 2025
Interview
A recruiter reached out to me via email saying I might be a good fit for a backend swe position they had. I did the first round interview which was pretty much just a call with an engineer and we did a hackerrank on a pretty simple problem with 2d arrays. After that they had me do the final round which is 4, 1-hour calls with engineers/hiring manager. There was a behavioral, where they asked me a lot about my current job and "tell me about a time". There was a hackerrank interview similar to the previous round. There was a system design interview where they gave me a system idea and asked me to write up the database schemas and what the API endpoints might look like. Then there was a debugging/testing interview where they asked me about testing methods and gave me a hackerrank with broken code and asked me to find all the problems. I thought I did fairly decent on the interviews, but in the end they rejected me and the feedback was I didn't have experience with their tech stack so they thought the "ramp up" time would take too long. Kind of annoying because they could've seen that from my resume and not put me through a 5 hour interview process.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The hackerrank coding assessments were just writing a method where you take 2 2d arrays and perform some type of logic on them.
I applied online. I interviewed at Chewy in May 2026
Interview
Applied online and received a call about 3 weeks later. We first had a screening phone interview where they asked things like "Why chewy".
About a week later there was a technical round scheduled with an engineer on the team. During this round I was presented with an easy hacker rank question and was able to move forward.
The final round was a set of 4 interviews, 3 of which were technical and 1 behavioral. The technical interviews involved debugging existing applications and talking through the design of a basic CRUD application. Each of these interviews was 1 hour long and they spanned over 2 days.
Overall, everyone was pretty respectful and friendly throughout the whole process.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Walk through the design of a basic CRUD application. Consider various trade offs of all the decisions you make.
I applied online. I interviewed at Chewy (Minneapolis, MN)
Interview
A phone call with behavioral questions about current work experience. Then a 10 minute multiple choice test with 20 questions about Java. Questions were on very specific parts of Java that I have not used before like Vector classes and different implementations of Vector classes.
On the initial call, the screener told me that the coding interview would be a series of coding questions on a certain skills-testing website, so that is what I prepared for. It wasn’t that at all— the interviewer plonked me down in an empty online environment that I wasn’t familiar with and basically said “build a web app, go” with very little guidance. I wasted too much time trying to figure out how to import different packages into the environment while the interviewer was very unclear on if that’s what he expected me to do or not. Then he said “time’s up” and was not interested in hearing any more about my thought process.