A Guide to the AIQ Technical Interview Experience
I’m Danny Graham, a Staff Engineer with AIQ’s Customer Intelligence team. I’m focused on promoting best practices as well as supporting and strategizing the planning and development processes. I interact with candidates at several phases of the interview process, particularly in Systems Design & Frontend competency. We are at an exciting point in our journey of introducing novel features for customers while improving architecture, performance & DevOps flows — there’s a ton of cool stuff to get into as an engineer with our team!
Preparation
Regardless of the interview stage, you should be prepared to demonstrate a fluid competency of navigating and operating your machine, your preferred dev environment, and your CLI. If you don’t have strong patterns of how you approach your environment every day, it might be useful to adopt some daily katas that get your fingers dancing on your keyboard and build your confidence.
Research your role
If it’s Frontend related, brush up on the React ecosystem, including maintenance upgrades. If it’s Backend related, make sure you’ve spent some time with your favorite language(s) and tools. Regardless of your role, you’ll want to do some reading on design patterns for building out scalable microservices and RPC/API interfaces.
Our interview process has several stages, so it can feel pretty intimidating, but take heart! We’re super cool, gracious people and we get that interviews can be pretty freaky. What we’re after here is probing out all of your areas of competency and making sure you talk to enough folks with different perspectives so that we can make a fair evaluation. We strive to make sure our interview questions and exercises are not onerous and give you room to express yourself. We are curious about what you can bring to AIQ and are looking for you to bring equal curiosity.
That said, we all want to see that candidates are taking this seriously, so don’t rest on your laurels. Do some reading, geek out a bit, check out some repos, play with stuff you haven’t for a while…or ever, and expand your horizons a bit to be prepared to share your successes and failures. If you have had some bumps in the road on your journey, that’s okay, show them off, tell us your story and show us your personal growth path.
Working Through the Exercise/Problem
Take a deep breath and remember, we’re very interested in your problem solving and communication skills. Many of our exercises and challenges don’t have a “right” answer; we like to see/hear how you think, how you navigate your machine, your creativity and your breadth of knowledge and experience.
If you feel stuck, share that with your interviewer. We often like to use “stuck” as a discussion point for looking at trade-offs, clarifying requirements and improving our interview questions and exercises.
How to Ask Questions (we love questions!)
Your questions are important. We invite you to ask questions throughout the interview process. It helps us improve as interviewers and will give you more confidence that you’re on the right track. Asking questions will also help you validate that you will be a great addition to our team. We’re very open about our culture, processes, and tools.
Problem solving is often a collaborative process, so feel free to ask questions during exercises — we love to geek out on a problem with candidates and see where things land. We’re not expecting you to have the right answers, your questions will help guide the conversation and give you an opportunity to share more about your experience and background in a practical way.
Advice before going into your AIQ Interview
Relax. I came into the interview process with 25 years of professional experience and I was super nervous. The interview setup felt a bit enterprisey and that was definitely not where I wanted to be, so I was concerned the actual interviews would be pointlessly challenging technical edge-cases. Nerp! It was chill — so chill in fact, that I started getting very excited that I’d found a new home. So relax, take it as it comes, prepare to have a few friendly conversations, get your geek on and see if we’re a match.
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ActionIQ is a new kind of customer data platform for enterprise brands, giving marketers easy and secure ways to activate data anywhere in the customer experience. ActionIQ’s unique composable architecture means data can stay securely where it lives, and marketing teams only use the tools they need. We are backed by top-tier VCs Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and March Capital. Enterprise brands such as Autodesk, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, e.l.f. Beauty, Atlassian and many more use our Composable CDP to achieve growth through better customer experiences.
Learn more at https://www.actioniq.com/
Read our product blog at https://www.actioniq.com/blog/
Explore our career openings at https://www.actioniq.com/careers/
Want to get in touch? Contact us: https://www.actioniq.com/contact-us/
