I applied through a staffing agency. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Grubhub (New York, NY) in Oct 2017
Interview
I came in for a half-day onsite interview in the NY office after a pretty easy Technical Phone Screen.
The NY office is cramped, relatively small, and not lit very well. Their HQ is in Chicago, so that is where all the best talent and office space is. By comparison, the NY office feels like a startup in a shabby sort of way. There was a small game room with a Wii. A significant portion of their tech talent is contracted to individuals outside the country (prob. to save money) including ones in Eastern Europe, so just keep that in mind. If hired, you might be video conferencing with colleagues that don't speak English well.
I didn't see a very strong or mature engineering culture there. Sometimes you can walk into a place and sense immediately that they have it together. This place does not exude that feeling.
First interview was with a Teach lead. He was a nice guy. The problem was to architect a UI on the Grubhub site.
Second interview was with a pompous engineer who made me not want to work there. He put his feet on the table and kinda smirked and sneered as I worked through a problem to write a setTimeout function and a debouncer function.
Third interview was with two guys who were foreigners that spoke non-fluent English and had trouble explaining the problem, so it was difficult to work through a solution while they kept adding more constraints because they explained the problem vaguely in the beginning.
Overall, I would only look at this company if you can't find a better job elsewhere.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Architect a solution for part of Grubhub UI in JS/React
Write a function that mimics JS's setTimeout
Write a debouncer function in JS
Architect a solution for typeahead with third-party API integrations on the backend
Three steps: Behavioral screen with the recruiter, followed by tech screen with an engineer, followed by virtual onsite with leetcode style questions in addition to system design and behavioral interview rounds.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Grubhub (Chicago, IL) in Jan 2025
Interview
I was contacted by a recruiter in January 2025, and scheduled a first-round live-coding interview with a tech lead. She was very helpful and supportive and it was probably the least stressful live-coding I've ever done. The interview involved coding functions for distributed architecture.
I was very quickly scheduled for a second and third interview, one a behavioral interview with the person who would be my manager, and a final live-coding interview with another engineer. The behavioral interview covered my experience with different technologies specific for the job and detailed coverage of one of my recent work projects. The final live-coding interview was also very relaxed and covered coding with data structures, specifically a linked list.
I was told the job was mine if the position was approved by the company's new owners, Wonder, after which I read that Wonder fired 25% of Grubhub's staff, and I haven't heard back since. The people I had the opportunity to talk to were magnificent, though.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
(In the context of distributed architecture) How could you incorporate a NoSQL structure to add to this system?
I applied online. The process took 6 months. I interviewed at Grubhub (Seattle, WA) in Oct 2024
Interview
- An initial call with the recruiter to discuss the role and how my experience aligns with the role and company.
- Phone Screen
- Final rounds with multiple engineers on the team and the hiring manager
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The question(s) were related to string manipulation, fairly common on YouTube and Leetcode, and were tagged accordingly.
Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Grubhub with 3 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 58% positive. To compare, the company-average is 59.1% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Software Engineer roles take an average of 22 days to get hired, when considering 52 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Grubhub overall takes an average of 18 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Grubhub as a Software Engineer according to 52 Glassdoor interviews include:
One on one interview: 25%
Phone interview: 23%
Presentation: 15%
Skills test: 11%
Group panel interview: 9%
IQ intelligence test: 5%
Drug test: 4%
Personality test: 4%
Other: 3%
Background check: 2%
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