Assembling the dream dev team

4 min readMay 21, 2019

#BeALofter is to be able to reinvent the process of buying and selling real estate in Brazil by leveraging technology and data to transform painful and bureaucratic processes into simple and delightful experiences.

But remember “With great power comes great responsibility” by Uncle Ben.

To help you #BeALofter, we created a simple 4-step instruction for our Tech Hiring Process. We’ll explain them all in this post. And you shouldn't worry if you’re not from São Paulo; it can be done remotely.

Step 1: Applying

We use a tool called Lever, where you can access the job description:

https://jobs.lever.co/loft/

Note: For internship or summer jobs, please apply on the Intern option

Once you apply on Lever, you should receive the Tech Screening link in a couple of days by e-mail.

Step 2: Tech Screening

In this step, we test and evaluate the candidate’s technical skills against a set of requirements using a software platform called Codility (https://www.codility.com/).

Prep

We recommend a quiet and reserved space for no interruptions.
Don’t forget your laptop power supply.
Stable wifi.
We STRONGLY recommend reserving 30 min to take the trial test to get acquainted with the tool, totaling 2 hours for the test screening.
The test has a time limit of 1 hour and 30 minutes. Generally, the first question is easier (we call it warm-up), so we advise you to spend most of the time on the rest.
Besides Codility, you don’t need any extra tool to solve the test.

Tips

You can choose the programming language that suits you the most on the dropdown list; we do not require you to know any specific one.
You can write your solution(s) in C, C++, C#, Go, Java, JavaScript, Kotlin, PHP, Python, Ruby, Scala, React, etc.
Don’t use IDE; write your code directly into Codility. It will help you in our evaluation by checking the step-by-step solution.
Read all the statements of the questions, and program how much time to spend on each.
Read up on basic algorithm, because we will ask you questions about data structures such as arrays, hashes, linked lists and tree structures.
The tool is going to present you some of the test scenarios. Be aware of hidden test scenarios, as they will impact your test score.

Step 3: Whiteboard with coding questions

If you score well on our tech screening, we will invite to talk to the team and have a more in-depth evaluation of your coding skills. In this step, we test and evaluate the candidate’s technical skills against a set of requirements using a whiteboard.

We do not require any specific programming language; however, you should know the languages’ nuances, such as how memory management works, or the most commonly used collections, libraries, etc.

Lofters will conduct the interview.
They will introduce themselves.
There will be 2 generic coding questions similar to Codility, where we will evaluate a brute force vs optimal solution, processing time and memory usage + test cases.
There will be one architectural question, system design, data modeling and stack of choice
Open space for Q&A will follow.

Tips

For the system design questions, mind how you start diagrams. From the center out? Or from the edge in?
You will be requested to come up with test scenarios.

Bonus