Datadog Software Engineering Intern interview process

Status: Software engineering intern, current MS CS
Position: SWE intern at Datadog
Location: NY
Date: January, 2019

Technical phone screen (45 minutes):

  • No behavioural questions
  • Algorithmic questions:
  1. You are given the list of logs of HTTP requests in the given format:
    [IP, HTTP Verb, status, response time, size, request time]
    Write the code to answer the various queries. For example, list all HTTP requests for the last 2 months or show all requests with 200 status, etc.
    Interviewer changes the query structure frequently and you should answer how you are going to attack that particular query.
    In the end, after the discussion of the pros and cons of different approaches you need to code that.

  2. You are working with the microservices architecture and you have a graph of servers.
    Each server is represented with its IP address. You know the duration of sending your data
    from server[i] to server[j]. As an input, you have an IP address from the starting server and the end
    server and you need to find the path from the ‘start’ to ‘end’ which takes the minimum amount of time
    and show its path.

  3. The next step is to take home test:

Create a console program to monitor performance and availability of websites
Websites and check intervals are user defined
Users can keep the console app running and monitor the websites
4. After the home test you need to go through the interview process with the CTO or a technical director. Just talking about your past experience.

My thoughts:
I really liked the whole interview process, the recruiters were reactive and friendly. A software engineer who interviewed me was skillful in his area.
Probably, we should go away from the pure algorithmic assessment of a candidate and create a mixture of the real life and coding problems.
Glad to see that there are some companies who are working towards that goal.
Finally, got an offer from the Datadog, however, couldn’t accept that because of the visa issues.