I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Samsara (Los Angeles, CA) in Oct 2022
Interview
The interview process was very efficient and extremely professional. It started out with a Manager (who is now my direct manager) reaching out to me on LinkedIn talking about Samsara, and sharing a couple engineering blogs regarding what Samsara does. The manager reached out in a way that made me feel they wanted 'me' specifically. I wasn't just another number in the machine. All my communications from then with the hiring team, recruiter, managers, engineers were all extremely professional. They honored other commitments I had, worked with my schedule, and we ended up scheduling basically a full day of interviews. Every interview was interesting, there were no dummy problems like LeetCode, but actual fun engineering problems to solve. No one was late to any meeting. Professional is all.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I believe we signed an NDA and so I can't get specific, but pretty much the standard stuff. Soft skills, coding problem, system design interview.
One of the worst interview experience that I had, the interviewer came more than 5 mins late. Then he gave me a question to solve and then straight away got busy on his phone. Some of the decisions that we
Only had an initial call with a frankly clueless recruiter. Could tell me very little about the role, what I would be working on, or even the tech stack. Interrupted me constantly and kept asking me if I had any more questions when she couldn't even answer the few I did have. Probably the worst HR phone screen I've ever had, and I've had a few.
Recruiter round was smooth and professional. However, the technical interview didn’t match what was described. The prep materials clearly said no Leetcode, and focused on Samsara's system related.
I prepared accordingly, but the interview ended up being a standard Leetcode medium. Disappointed by the mismatch — if algorithm questions are preferred, let candidates know.
Advice to others:
Prepare for Leetcode
