How to Ace a Technical Interview at Infobip

For a tech company that went from 1 to 140 Software Engineers in 10 years, selecting great Engineers who will contribute to our platform is essential. Recruiting the best people is one of the most important ways to scale a growing company! That’s why we invested a lot of effort into making technical interviewing one of our best practices.

Tackling that coding problem

In engineering, your brain is your main tool. In technical interviews we want to see how your mind works.

Although interviewers differ in their style of interviewing, when you come for a technical interview you will most likely be given a basic coding problem to solve, similar to the famous Fizz Buzz problem. Over the years of doing technical interviews, we learned that even the simplest problems provide valuable insights into candidates.

Here’s what we’re looking for during the technical interview:

Your approach is just as important as the solution – What factors do you take into account when approaching a problem?

Simplicity of your solution – What is the most elegant way of solving this problem?

Your potential for optimizing code – We don’t expect your solution to be perfect, but what matters is if you can recognize elements and ways in which your code could be optimized.

Taking edge cases into account

Of course the technical questions differ from junior engineer to architect positions. If you’re senior, we will want to see your mastery of a particular technology, the depth of your knowledge (e.g. why you use certain technology or how this technology works “under the hood”), and the quality of your architectural solutions.

In a technical interview it’s not just your technical skills that are being assessed. How you approach the task is equally important. Are you up for the challenge? Are you enthusiastic about the problem? How do you respond to feedback that you get from the interviewer?

What else do we assess?

While at the technical interview the focus is on your technical skills, we want to know more about how you acquired them.

First, we want to know about your accomplishments. What do you consider your biggest accomplishments? What is the impact of the code that you have written? Writing code that impacts millions of customers certainly carries some weight.

We also want to get a sense of your potential for growth. Not all great candidates have worked for a company whose products reach millions and challenge them every day. And that’s fine; it’s a good thing that you want to learn and develop!

Most importantly we want to see how you fit in. Everyone at Infobip is passionate about technology, so we want to surround ourselves with people who inspire us day by day.

Lastly, we want to know** your career aspirations.**. What would be a good career move for you? How can we provide it to you?

A couple of helpful tips

Now, this wouldn’t be a great how-to blog post if we didn’t share some tips with you, would it? We assembled a short list of our top tips based on our technical interviewing experience, including a few surprising ones.

Before you tackle that coding problem, make sure that you understand the requirements. The easiest way to do it is to repeat it out loud and ask questions. Talk out the problem while you’re solving it. This helps the interviewer follow your train of thought and if you get stuck, the interviewer can navigate you through to a solution. While it is certainly desirable to pause for a minute and think about the best way to solve the problem, don’t overthink it. Start solving the problem and optimize your solution along the way, like you would normally. Always have questions for the interviewer. This is your chance to find out everything you want about the way we approach engineering, the technologies we use, and which products you could be working on. In the end, always remember that our aim is to find a great new colleague, not to run a survivor camp. Come in good spirits and relax. We are actually rooting for you to succeed!

By Dragan Bencic, Senior Software Engineer / Technical Interviewer & Marija Todtling, Technical Recruiter

Dec 19th, 2016
3 min read