Okta Software Engineer Interview Experience — One-Hour Phone Screen with BQ and a CodeSignal Pagination API

Okta's interviews feel like they vary a lot by team. I read a few other write-ups and they were all pretty different.

From the recruiter to the interviewers, the company culture seemed pretty good and everyone was nice. If I get rejected, it just means I wasn't good enough. Anyways, posting this for whoever interviews next.

My phone screen was 1 hour: 25 minutes of BQ, 30 minutes of coding, 5 minutes for my questions. There were 3 BQ questions: 1. How do you use AI; 2. Talk about how you led other engineers on a project; 3. Talk about a project you did with another team / a PM.

The coding part was pretty practical. In CodeSignal I had to write a GET API in Java. A POST API and another GET API were already written and I could use them as reference. Then I ran some simple tests. Part 2 was about pagination. It was very easy, but I've been writing so much Python lately that my Java was a bit rusty, and I eventually struggled through it and finished.

Follow-ups: what if the data volume is too large; if this were a production system, how would you design the DB, how would you design the indexes, etc.