I applied to Hubspot directly on their website after seeing an open position in their Products team on LinkedIn or Stackoverflow Jobs, I do not exactly remember which one, in Dublin.
I got an email reply in a day or two to schedule a 30 min call with the HR to see whether I am a good fit for the company and also for her to say something about the team and company in general. She also kept some time to answer any questions I had. Soon after this call, she sent me a link to their online assessment and asked me to complete it within a couple of days.
The Online Assessment had a 3 hour time limit and the timer would start once I click the link to view the question. Because of this, I did the assignment on a weekend when there would be no distractions. The question was to read some JSON data from two endpoints that would contain information regarding the availability of different persons in different countries and a number of events occurring in each country. And the task was to post another JSON to an endpoint with events and event dates such that a maximum number of people can attend the event in that country. It sounds simple as I only gave you a high-level overview but it took me some time to get my results accepted as there were a few nuances. You should get a 200 OK response from the endpoint when you post your results to it and you would also get an email with a link to upload your code. If everything looks good then you would be called for onsite.
I got a reply from HR in a day or two and they said the code looks good and are happy to proceed with the onsite interview. She also mentioned that she would call me to brief me about the process in advance. I scheduled the call right away as I wanted to know more about the onsite interview process before starting to prepare myself. The onsite process was simple enough. Three rounds in total, i.e, design, database, and chat with VP. I was given the details of the interviewers in each round too. I scheduled the onsite after 10 days so that I can do some research before the interview. I gleaned from glassdoor, blind, linkedin, google, blogs (like this one), etc. and prepared some notes for the interview.
My onsite was scheduled at 2 pm in the Dublin office. As I was already living and working in Dublin, no travel or accommodation arrangements were needed. I wasn’t asked to bring my laptop as there were no coding rounds in onsite but I took it with me anyway, to be on the safe side. The recruiter greeted me at the entrance, gave a tour of the office, and finally, dropped me in the interview room. The first round was the Design round. There was only a single engineer in this round. He asked me to design a URL shortener. You can start by asking some questions on the requirements and noting down the same on the whiteboard. After you’re clear with the requirements, you can start drawing on the board and also explaining while you’re designing. He may be giving some useful tips in between and my advice is to carefully listen to those and design accordingly. There may be many components in a product and the interviewer may want you to design component A of URL shortener and not component B. So, using the clues from the interviewer as you go is essential. In the end, he may put some real-life conditions to your design and see how your design works. In my case, the design was great and it handled almost all important real-life cases as I took some ideas from educative.io a few days before the interview. So, I was quite happy with the design and the discussions we had in this round.
The next round was the Database round. There were two engineers in this round. They started by asking a simple SQL query and continued to ask more SQL queries throughout the interview. If you’re okay with the basic SQL clauses, you know how JOINS work, etc. then you will do fine in this interview. The queries were about Facebook’s newsfeed.
The last round was a Chat with the VP, based in Boston. That day, for some reason the VP wasn’t available at the time so I was asked to either have the interview at home or some other day at the office. I wanted to wrap everything the same day so I chose to interview the same day from my house. We had a video call at night (my time) but he didn’t turn on his camera for some reason. I was expecting him to turn on his camera for a more involved conversation. Anyway, it was not a big deal for me. He asked mainly about my role in my current company, how would I react in different situations, etc. He also gave time for me to ask him questions and he answered them all. It was a normal conversation and we chatted for an hour and the interview was over.
I am not writing about the next steps as it was a long story in my case. I can only say that I am not working with Hubspot currently. However, I hope my interview experience helps you in your preparation. All the best!
P.S. The banner you see in this post is right in front of the Hubspot Dublin office. I took it before the interview though. You can check out my Shutterstock profile for the actual photo.
