I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Samsara in Mar 2022
Interview
Initial call with the recruiter who was rather friendly and gave a pretty decent overview of what the company was about and how they went public in December of 2021 ($$$). The next round was a phone interview with the hiring manager who gave a rather interesting coding challenge. I wasn't able to finish the problem in roughly 30 minutes, but I probably got like 75% of it completed. Anyways, they ended up passing, so I’m assuming they want you to either get the problem or get a higher percentage of it completed.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Parse a markdown string and output the HTML string. You're basically creating a markdown processor that converts a string to it's equivalent html tag.
One of the worst interview experience that I had, the interviewer came more than 5 mins late. Then he gave me a question to solve and then straight away got busy on his phone. Some of the decisions that we
Only had an initial call with a frankly clueless recruiter. Could tell me very little about the role, what I would be working on, or even the tech stack. Interrupted me constantly and kept asking me if I had any more questions when she couldn't even answer the few I did have. Probably the worst HR phone screen I've ever had, and I've had a few.
Recruiter round was smooth and professional. However, the technical interview didn’t match what was described. The prep materials clearly said no Leetcode, and focused on Samsara's system related.
I prepared accordingly, but the interview ended up being a standard Leetcode medium. Disappointed by the mismatch — if algorithm questions are preferred, let candidates know.
Advice to others:
Prepare for Leetcode
Senior Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Samsara with 2.8 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 35% positive. To compare, the company-average is 50.8% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Senior Software Engineer roles take an average of 19 days to get hired, when considering 34 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Samsara overall takes an average of 24 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Samsara as a Senior Software Engineer according to 34 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 34%
One on one interview: 23%
Skills test: 18%
Group panel interview: 10%
Background check: 5%
Presentation: 3%
Personality test: 2%
Other: 2%
Drug test: 1%
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