My Interview Experience at a Blockchain Startup (Remote)

About Me

• I am a full-stack developer working at a remote-first-based organization. I have close to one year of experience in industry-level software development.

• I am proficient in ReactJS, NodeJS, SpringBoot, PostgreSQL, & MongoDB.

How I got Approached

• I was approached by the startup founder through the mail and got an invite to their Discord internal server. He found my profile on cryptojobslist.com

• The recruiter told me to go through the projects they have been working on before the interview. I was interested in a project where they were building a credit card-like system through cryptocurrency. The tech stack was Typescript, ReactJS, NodeJS, and Rust(I had no exp 🥲). The startup was very new or you can they were in their initial days

• I had only 9 hrs for the interview before it was scheduled.

Round 1

• The interview lasted about 1 hr long.

• Asked me to introduce myself and explain about the tech stack I was currently working on.

• Started directly with a DSA question after this. The first question was to find m^n (basically pow(m, n))with the least time complexity. Started from the worst and ended up with the best algorithm.

• The second question was to find the shortest distance between two nodes in a Graph given the two nodes. Though it was a straightforward question, I didn't brush up on my graph algorithms. But was still satisfied with the solution I have given.

• After this, we jumped into the system design question. The problem statement was, I have to create a system where users can buy, sell and bid NFTs (Startup was working on this kind of project). He wanted everything from tech stack to how to scale the application.

• He also asked me how does this auction work, which I answered completely wrong.

• He also what I do in my free time apart from my daily routine.

I directly asked the interviewer for feedback, and though he was hesitant he gave me a lot of suggestions to improve on particular things. We also discussed my role in the organization and the project I would work on if I get selected.

Fun fact is that the interviewer was just 23 years old around my age but he already had 5-6 years of experience. He started the dev journey when he was 17 years old.

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Still waiting for the results, my interview went bad. He rated me 6/10. I would suggest everyone to brush up on important things before giving your interview, I brushed up on my react and nodejs topics but the interviewer didn't bother to ask even a single question on that.

Hope this helped you! Contact me at Bharath Kalyan S , till then signing off.