Full Stack Engineering Interview Cheatsheet

What we are looking for at SayMosaic. What to prepare.

Phone Screen

1. Are you familar with more than one part of a project's life circle? (backend, frontend, mobile, devops, etc.)
2. Are you familar with JavaScript or a compile-to-JS language?
3. Are you interested in our product?

One hour technical interview

Questions may involve coding, code review, software engineering fundamentals, JS fundamentals, system design. We will be using hangouts and coderpad.

Coding

Basic data structure and algorithms. We won't implement a red–black tree. But you should be able to implement a fizz buzz under 10 minutes.

Code Review

Pretend it is a real life PR involving changes to one file waiting for your review. There might be some issues with the logic of the code, and / or the code is not following the best practices of writing clean code.

Software Engineering Fundamentals

You are familar with basic data structures, algorithms, design principles, current best practices. We may not ask you direct questions, but it should be reflected during other questions.

JS fundamentals

You are either an expert on the ECMAScript specs, or some particular libraries in the ecosystem. We are not looking for memorizing excatly how something is implenmented. But what problems are they trying to solve? How would you implenment a solution? What are the tradeoffs of possible different solutions? This is likely to turn into a design question for experienced candidates.

System Design

You know how to design the first version of an application. How to scale it. How to deal with edge cases. What are the tradeoffs of different solutions?

Onsite Interview

It would be similar questions with the one hour interview, but harder with more time given. Bring your laptop with your favorite setup.

Coding

Harder questions that might involve recursion, dynamic programming, tree traversal, etc. It might take 30 min to solve it. Make sure to show us your thinking process, write test cases, and know the time and space complexity of your solution.

Code Review

We will be looking into a repo instead of just one file. We are likely to pick a popular open source project. We are not expecting you to fix an issue in limited time. We are looking for how you navigate through a code base.

JS fundamentals

Instead of just talking, we might analyze the performance of some JavaScript code. We might polyfill some utilities or syntax sugar.

System Design

More follow up questions to build out an application.