Reddit · Primly Community

went through the Reddit iOS loop last month, here's what actually happened

mobile_mara · 5 replies

applied in early may, heard back in about a week. recruiter call was pretty standard, she was nice, walked me through the team (Freeform/third-party clients team) and gave a clear timeline upfront which i appreciated.

phone screen was 60 minutes with a mid-level iOS eng. one medium-ish coding problem, lots of follow-up questions on time complexity, then we talked about my experience with offline caching and background sync. felt conversational, not gotcha-y.

virtual onsite was four rounds back-to-back on a zoom call: coding (array manipulation + some edge cases around sorted input), iOS fundamentals (memory management, runloop, the usual but they actually went deep), systems design (design a notification feed, they wanted specifics on push vs pull and how to handle unread counts at scale), and then a behavioral.

the behavioral was not fluff. interviewer asked me about a time i had to push back on a product decision as an engineer. they probed pretty hard on what the outcome was and whether i would do it differently. the whole "balance community needs vs. feature velocity" angle was real, not just a talking point.

got the offer 8 days after the final round. comp was competitive for SF. overall: fair loop, people were engaged, no trick questions. iOS infra at Reddit is genuinely interesting if you care about scale.

5 replies

jp_newgrad

the behavioral going that deep is something i keep hearing about Reddit. did you prep specific STAR stories or did you kind of wing it based on your actual experience?

mobile_mara

i had 4-5 stories i'd written out beforehand and practiced out loud. honestly the STAR format felt a little rigid mid-interview so i loosened up and just told it like a story with a clear outcome. they seemed to prefer that over the robotic version.

sre_sol

notification feed design is such a good signal question for Reddit specifically. push vs pull at their scale (billions of votes/day) is not trivial. did they want you to get into fan-out-on-write territory or did they keep it higher level?

mobile_mara

we got into it. i started high-level and they kept asking "ok what happens when a popular subreddit post blows up." ended up talking about hybrid fan-out and how you'd handle celebrity accounts differently. they seemed to want to see you push the design, not just stay at the whiteboard-box level.

bootcamp_bri

this is really helpful. did they care at all about your app store portfolio or was it purely the interview performance?