RejectedSoftware Development Engineer 2 at Quince
- Difficulty
- Process took
- 1-2 Weeks
- Rounds
- 3
- Format
- Remote
- Applied via
- Referral
How it went
- You’ll get better with each attempt-Looking back, every interview I’ve done—hits or misses—has helped me improve. Don’t be too hard on yourself if things don’t work out. There’s always another opportunity.
- Don’t try to “sound smart.” Just be honest, curious, and open. If you make a mistake, own it, explain it, and show how you’d fix it
What they would tell you
- You’ll get better with each attempt-Looking back, every interview I’ve done—hits or misses—has helped me improve. Don’t be too hard on yourself if things don’t work out. There’s always another opportunity.
- Don’t try to “sound smart.” Just be honest, curious, and open. If you make a mistake, own it, explain it, and show how you’d fix it
How to prepare
- Don’t skip the LLD and concurrency practice. Honestly, I wish I had spent more time on these topics before my interview.
Their background
My background is primarily in Java and Python, and I have hands-on experience with microservices and event-driven architecture.
Round by round
- 1
Screening60 min
The process kicked off with a screening round conducted by HireHunch. It started with a general coding problem, nothing too tricky, but it set the tone. After that, the conversation veered into a high-level discussion of a low-level design (LLD) problem. Honestly, the exact problems escape me now, and the interviewer was mostly interested in seeing how I structured my thoughts rather than getting a perfect answer right away.
- 2
DSA60 min
For this round, there were two coding questions, one easy and one classic medium. The first problem was about analyzing a 2D array to count something around “towers”, it felt a bit like a grid traversal with some logic on top. While the concept was straightforward, the interviewer seemed to care a lot about clean, readable code and edge cases. The second question was a bit harder but instantly familiar: finding the length of the longest substring without repeating characters. I’d practiced variations of this before, so I talked through my approach, using a sliding window and hash map, and got to code a working solution. We discussed space and time complexity, and the feedback was positive.
- 3
Low-Level Design60 min
LLD round, focusing on designing an elevator system. I was given a pretty detailed problem statement about handling both internal and external requests. The tricky part was figuring out how to efficiently manage and prioritize these requests. I stumbled early by picking the wrong data structure for the request queue, the interviewer noticed right away and gave a subtle hint. Once I corrected course, I was able to model a more logical flow for request management. Next, I had to actually implement the elevator’s moving strategy, deciding which direction the elevator should move and how to handle multiple, potentially conflicting requests. I got some more hints as I went, but by the end, I had a working (though not perfect) piece of code. The interviewer seemed satisfied with the approach, but I knew I could have done better with clearer initial assumptions.
What came up
A candidate-reported account, lightly edited. Interview processes change by team and date.