Magalix Engineering Interview Guide

We are incubated in one of the Coolest Offices in Egypt

We believe that the value of Magalix stems from each team member. We lay a lot of emphasis on our hiring and onboarding of new team members. We believe that the hiring process should be an enjoyable and educational experience for you (interviewee) and Magalixers as well. We thought of providing you some guidelines to set you up for success during the interview process. We saw that the number one reason for candidates not passing our interview process is the lack of clear expectations resulting in a candidate's inability to prepare properly.

What Does The Magalix Team Look For in Each Candidate?

• Technical excellence
• Clear communication
• Cultural fit

What Kind Of Questions Should You Expect?

We usually cover multiple areas. Depending on the role and your level of experience, we may cover different aspects in a single interview or you may find the interview focused on a single aspect. However, we cover all aspects below by the end of the process:

• Problem Solving: We focus on solving core computer science problems that are commonly taught in undergraduate (data structures and algorithms). We don’t ask any mathematical or mind-challenging generic puzzles.
• Programming: We want to see your coding skills and how you consider edge cases and testing.
• Software and Systems Design: We cover object oriented designs, web-based system designs and technologies .
• Behavioral: We evaluate for cultural fit:

What Makes a Good Cultural Fit?

Our culture is built on the following core values:

• Start with the Customer: Build the right thing.
  Start with the customer and work backwards. It is about delivering the "right" things.
• Strive for Operational Excellence: Build it right
  Deliver "robust" and "stable" solutions. It is about delivering things "right" ?
• Have a Bias for Action: Just Do It.
  Get things done and be accountable. Keep moving and own your tasks, your systems, your successes, and your failures.
• Be Curious: Ask why
  Question why things are the way they are. Dig deeper to understand what is under the hood.
• Be Innovative: Ask why not
  If you only listen to your customers, you will fail. Innovate on their behalf and think outside the box.
• Deliver Results: Measure success
  You can't achieve what you can't measure and activity does not mean progress. Be result-oriented and data-driven.

How Should You Prepare?

• Research Magalix and understand our space.
• Go through the Magalix website and understand its content as much as possible.
• Read one or more of our blog posts
• Understand what is cloud-native and what is Kubernetes if you don’t know already.
• Refresh your knowledge in each of the interview areas:
• Data structures and algorithms
• Problem-solving
• Prepare to talk about your current and prior projects
• We want to know your role and contributions in these projects
• Be able to talk about the technologies you used or built
• Discuss the results you achieved or the impact your work had on your team and your users

Any Best Practices?

• Come prepared as much as you can.
• Answer questions as briefly as possible and give a chance to the interviewer to steer the discussion in the right direction. Talking too much while answering a question doesn’t improve your acceptance chances.
• Listen to the question carefully and make sure you answer the right question. Don’t get into tangential issues unless your interviewer asked you to dig deeper into the specifics of your answer.
• If the interviewer asks to tell him/her about the last time or a situation that you faced such and such, make sure to remember a specific situation and talk about that specific situation. Talking in generality or what should be done but not mentioning a specific example doesn’t help your interviewer to understand you more.
• Use the STAR method to answer behavioral questions.
• Please ask questions to clarify. Some questions might be vague on purpose so that you ask questions and clarify what you are solving for.
• In the case of technical questions, start with a simple solution and build it up accordingly. Usually starting with complex answers will make it harder for you to expand on the question. We want to see engineers who can solve problems swiftly, make the right trade-off, and able to critique solutions in a constructive way.
• We are interested in how you think more than what you know. If you don’t know the solution, say that you don’t know but try to propose a solution in light of what you know so far.
• Think loudly and share your thought process with the interviewer. Having a long period of silence won’t help. Help the interviewer to hear your inner thinking voice :)
• You are also interviewing Magalix and you want to make sure that it is a good fit for you as well. Ask questions to understand how we work, team dynamics, daily routines and how we make decisions.
• If you are making a remote interview through Google Hangouts or any other online conferencing tool, make sure you have good audio setup and in a quiet place
• Do the interview from your laptop just in case you will need to go through shared coding questions.

Any Resources To Help Prepare?

• Cracking the coding interview is a great book to understand different parts of the interview process and what you should be optimizing for.

Frequently Asked Questions

Must I Have a Formal education in Computer Science and Engineering To Be Interviewed at Magalix?

• No. But we ask some basic computer science questions relevant to computing complexity, algorithms, programming languages, networking, etc. Our interviews are usually much easier to go through if you got a formal education in those areas. But we came across many candidates who did really well and never got a formal computer science and engineering education. If you are not a computer science and engineering graduate, don’t let that discourage you. Please apply and get challenged?

Do I Get Immediate Interview Feedback?

• No. We usually convene as a team and go through different candidates’ interview results before we decide on the next step.