Nooks Software Engineer Interview Experience — Web Crawler BFS Screen, Twitter Design Onsite, Rejected

This is a small company in SF that does phone-sales tech (cold-calling/telemarketing technology).

Phone screen: a BFS problem dressed up as a Web Crawler question. Follow-up: the BFS needs to make API calls — how do you avoid bottlenecks, DDOS attacks, and so on.

Onsite:

Live debugging: build a full-stack app for a "YouTube Party." This one was kind of fun — the problem is posted publicly on Gitee, worth a look if you're curious.

Live coding: again a LeetCode graph problem dressed up as a real-world scenario; DFS was enough to pass it.

System design: design Twitter.

Technical deep dive.

Wrap-up and reflection: I got rejected two days after the interview. I think I should have done better in the deep dive round — the interviewer really went deep, and it was heavily focused on behavioral questions. This company seems to have a bit of a top-school bias — all the interviewers were from top-4 CS schools or Ivies, so it makes sense that I, a mid-tier UC undergrad, didn't get in.