got pinged by a Retool recruiter for a backend/infrastructure role. call is next week. trying to get a sense of the actual interview structure before i commit time to prepping specific things.
a few specific questions: how technical is the phone screen vs the onsite? for backend roles, is system design mostly about their product (internal tools, data connectors) or more generic distributed systems? any sense of whether they do live coding vs take-home or is it both?
i've been doing Retool-adjacent work (data pipelines feeding internal tooling) so i feel decent about the product context. just want to know what i'm walking into.
drop your loop details below if you've been through it recently. role, level, rough timeline, what surprised you. all useful.
4 replies
frontend_fran
frontend loop but for reference: it was both live coding AND a take-home. not one or the other. don't assume it's just one format.
corp_refugee
for backend at a tooling company like Retool, system design tends to be product-adjacent. think 'how do you build a reliable query connector that handles multiple data sources with different consistency models' rather than 'design Twitter.' the context matters and they expect you to connect to their actual product.
sre_sol
went through their infra loop about 7 months back. phone screen was pretty technical, not just 'tell me about yourself.' they had me walk through a debugging scenario. onsite was 4 hours, 4 rounds, live coding + system design + two behavioral. no take-home for my track but sounds like it might vary by role.
de_derek
that's really helpful. debugging scenario on the phone screen is good to know, i'll make sure i can actually articulate my debugging process out loud and not just in my head.