I was contacted by a recruiter via LinkedIn. After a brief email exchange he set up a phone call with Peek's CTO and co-founder. This was great since, instead of your regular recruiting pitch with not a lot of answers about specifics, I got to talk to someone directly in engineering who also knew about other aspects of the company. The next step was a set of on-site interviews. I met the CTO, a couple of engineers, a product manager and a designer. With the CTO we talked about my background and the role. The engineers asked about my experience and systems I had built. I had to sketch out some architectures and they would ask me about pain points, pros and cons in my design and how I would extend it to support other use cases. The product people did more of a culture fit interview and asked me questions about how I work with projects and people and how I would handle certain difficult situations. They asked some really interesting questions and I felt positively challenged and really enjoyed the discussions. One of the interview sessions late in the day ended with me being invited to an office happy hour where I got to meet more engineers and people from other teams. It was a great way to get a feel for the company culture. During another session, I also got to meet the CEO who shared a ton of information about the company’s business and strategy. This gave me a really good sense of the opportunities for Peek. After the on-site interview I was given a take-home coding challenge which involved building an activity booking backend with real-time availability. It involved some really interesting and tricky use cases. The great thing about the challenge is that it's a problem at the core of Peek's activities platform, so you really got a sense of the kinds of problems the engineering team is working on. The challenge took about 10-15 hours to complete and I spent a few nights on it. After my solution to the coding challenge was accepted, I met with the CTO again, who was ready to give me an offer. We discussed the general terms and the next day he sent me an official offer letter with all the details, which I later accepted. I really liked everyone I met during the interview process. They were all really smart and friendly and they all shared a great passion for Peek. The people were one of the things that attracted me the most to the company. It was great that I got to meet both engineers and non-engineers as well as the co-founders. It gave me a much clearer picture of the organization and how it would be to work there. I also really liked the interview format with the coding challenge. It was a “real” problem which tested my technical skills the right way. And it was fun.