This post from 2019 still represents the spirit of our hiring process for technical roles. However, please find the most up to date description of our interview process on our careers page.
In this post we want to give you an overview of our values and interview process hiring for technical full-time positions in our team. We hope this guide helps you navigate the process successfully and answers your questions. Should you have any more questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out at jobs@meshcloud.io.
We believe that hiring is as much about us getting to know you than it is about you getting to know us. Our application and interview process is thus designed to give both of us a chance to evaluate your fit for a position at meshcloud.
Overview and TL;DR
- Application with CV and Portfolio (Github, Stackoverflow, etc.)
- Phone Interview
- On-Site Interview at our Office & Design Exercise
- On-Site "MVP Test" with your future colleagues
- Feedback and offer
Stage 0: Your Application
Present yourself and your skills in the best possible light. Let us know why you’re interested in working for meshcloud and consider yourself a good fit for our team. Tell us about your values, achievements and contributions you have made in prior roles. If you’re a recent graduate, tell us about a project you’ve worked on that you’re proud of. Even more than your concise resume, we like seeing a sample of your work and abilities. Send us a link to your projects, your stackoverflow or github profile.
Please do not include information on your resume that we don’t need to evaluate your application. All that matters to us is your qualifications and personality. We do specifically ask you to not include a photo, gender, marital status or religious orientation.
When we do list the technologies we work with in our job profiles, we always separate between "must have" skills and "nice to have" skills. We believe that every technical skill is valuable. So while we may not use [insert obscure language] right now, there’s a good chance you have learned something valuable and transferrable using it. So, please do include it on your CV! We’re open-minded when it comes to integrating new tech & tools into our stack. Our most recent addition is dhall.
1st Stage: Phone Interview
You’ll meet one on one with the future manager of your position for a structured 30 minute phone interview. We expect you to tell us briefly about yourself and your experience. We’ll discuss the role and answer any questions you may have about the position. The second half of the interview is a set of technical questions that helps us get an indication of your skill level in competence areas relevant for the job. We’re not looking for textbook answers and you should not prepare specifically for this part.
2nd Stage: On-Site Interview
The on-site interview typically lasts for 2-3 hours. You’ll get to visit our office and meet members of the team you may be working with in the future! You’ll also meet members of other teams at meshcloud.
We’ll discuss in-depth about your prior experience and will together walk through a technical design exercise appropriate for the role. We use this exercise to see your problem-solving process and how you leverage your experience, skills and knowledge to solve the task at hand. This may also involve some whiteboarding or scribbling on paper, but we’ll not ask you to come up with syntactically correct code on paper. The challenges are hands-on and real things we’re working on, so they will allow you to discover about the things we work on and how our tech stack looks like.
3rd Stage: MVP Build
We don’t belive take-home "coding exercises" or "coding tests" provides you with a good idea of how we work at meshcloud. Instead, we want to give you a chance to experience being a part of the team and see how we work first hand.
So what we do is that we will together develop a small and focused "minimum viable product" (MVP) related to your role. We typically start in the morning and walk through the task at hand. The goal is to produce a working prototype in 3 hours.
When building the prototype, we totally expect you’ll have to cut some corners. Of course you’ll discuss requirements and implementation questions with your colleagues. When we start in the morning, we invite you out for lunch with the team and review your results together after we return. In review you’ll present your approach and results, tell us about the corners you cut and what would be left to finish the work to your own quality standards.
If you’re a remote candidate or considering relocation to work with us in Frankfurt am Main, we will try to schedule the On-Site Interview and MVP Test for the same day.
Final Stage: Feedback and Offer
You’ll typically hear from us within a week of your interview whether we want to offer you the position. We know that you’d rather hear sooner than later whether your interview with us was a success. However, we want to make sure we give every application the attention it deserves. After your interview we collect feedback from all colleagues that got a chance to know you. We also give our colleagues some time to make up their mind and offer additional feedback after the experience has settled for a bit.
You want to learn more about us?
Please check our open positions.