I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Valon (New York, NY) in Aug 2022
Interview
Absolutely the worst technical recruiter call I've ever had. I mentioned "good office culture and healthy work/life balance" as something I'm looking for in a position. Was asked how I felt about work/life balance "when there are deadlines you need to hit".
I responded that I understand that obviously there are sometimes hard business deadlines that require working long hours, but in a healthy org I'd expect that this doesn't happen often and, when it does, that management makes sure that people are taking PTO afterward to make up for it and prevent burnout.
Was told that the recruiter "couldn't speak to that". They then reiterated that "sometimes there are just deadlines and everyone needs to pitch in and work long hours."
So uh. Good luck everybody!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How do you handle situations where there's a lot of work to do on a tight deadline?
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Valon in May 2025
Interview
Recruiter reached out and had a 30 minute screen. Set up a "general coding interview" (i.e. leetcode) and a behavioral with a hiring manager. Passing those would lead to two more techinical interview that were more relevant to the company.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
We have data on how our servicing team members reach out to homeowners for resolving escalations, but we’ve found that how we schedule calls is not optimal. We can schedule homeowner calls between the hours of 7am and 6pm, and we want to space out the time between the calls within a single day as much as possible for a single servicing team member to give them breaks between calls.
We want the time between calls to be as equally spaced out as possible. If there are multiple options of equally spaced out calls, we want to schedule the longer calls and longer breaks towards the beginning of the day.
Given a list of tuples (day of week, call duration in hours) of calls, implement a method to print out the most optimal call schedule. To simplify things, you can assume that calls must start at the beginning of an hour, and they last in increments of an hour.
I applied online. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Valon (San Francisco, CA) in Aug 2023
Interview
Begin with a recruiter chat and a behavioral interview with an engineering manager. Then, we followed with a 2.5 hour real-world coding problem. This interview is not leetcode style and consists of 1 hour of pair programming and 1 hour of solo programming then 30 minutes of a code review/walkthrough. If that goes well, the process ends with a system design interview.
I applied online and had an initial call with HR. They were highly disinterested the whole time talking to me. They were very rushed and barely asked questions. I could easily tell that I was wasting her time. Needless to say I was rejected. This process was very unprofessional.
Senior Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Valon with 3 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 50% positive. To compare, the company-average is 33.9% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Senior Software Engineer roles take an average of 13 days to get hired, when considering 6 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Valon overall takes an average of 19 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Valon as a Senior Software Engineer according to 6 Glassdoor interviews include:
Skills test: 33%
Phone interview: 33%
One on one interview: 33%
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