Fiverr Software Engineer Interview Guide

The phone screen round of a Fiverr software engineer interview generally consists of a recruiter or hiring manager discussing your education background, experience, and skills related to software engineering. 

The interviewer will evaluate your technical skills, communication skills, and assess your problem-solving and coding abilities. If they believe that you have the potential to fit in the role, they will schedule an on-site interview to conduct an more in-depth evaluation of your skills and to see if you would be a good fit for the team.

Like other software engineering interviews, technical interviews at Fiverr also include data structures, algorithms, and system design and architecture questions. Let's look at each of these rounds in detail:

A. Team-level Interview

The team-level interview is the first technical round in the Fiver software engineering interview process, and it's an opportunity for the candidate to showcase their technical skills and knowledge of computer science concepts. The interview is conducted by the team leader and department head, and it is designed to test the candidate's understanding of data structures, algorithms, and system design and architecture.

During this round, candidates can expect to be challenged with mid-level to high-level live coding questions. These coding challenges will test their problem-solving abilities, coding skills, and ability to perform under pressure. If you have gone through other interviews that similar, i.e. Google Software Engineering Interview, you would realise that this role has a similar theme, too!

Here are some questions that a candidate might expect in this round:

• Write a function that returns an array and an Integer. 
• Write a function that implements the bubble sort algorithm.
• Design an algorithm to reverse a linked list.
• Write a function to find the longest common subsequence of two strings.
• Given a binary tree, write a function to find its height.
• Design an efficient algorithm to find the kth smallest element in a binary search tree.

How to tackle the team-level round?

• To begin with, make sure you have a solid understanding of basic computer science concepts such as data structures, algorithms, and system design. 
• You will need to practice solving coding challenges and implementing algorithms before the interview. You can participate in online coding competitions or use resources like LeetCode to prepare.
• Familiarize yourself with the Fiverr platform and its offerings. This will not only show the interviewers your genuine interest in the company but also give you a good background on what the company needs in terms of coding skills.
• In the team-level interview, you'll likely be coding on a whiteboard. Be prepared to work through problems and explain your thought process as you code.

B. Group Level

The second technical round will be a more in-depth examination of your technical abilities and how you approach problem-solving and decision-making. It is conducted by the group manager, and you will be asked system design questions, situation-based, and logical questions—so as to delve deeper into your background, technical skills, and past work experiences, and understand your ability to handle challenges and think logically.

For instance, candidates who have interviewed with Fiverr report being asked programming questions (typically Leetcode coding challenges), system design questions (Grokking style), and behavior questions like "Describe a project where you faced challenges."

Here are some common questions you can expect:

• Design a scalable e-commerce website that can handle a high volume of transactions per second.
• Implement a LRU cache with a fixed size.
• Tell me about a time when you had to debug a complex issue in your code. How did you approach the problem and what was the outcome?
• How would you go about optimizing a database that has become slow over time?
• Explain how you would implement a spell-checker in a text editor

You can also expect logical and analytical brain teasers questions like:

Two players are playing a game with two dice, one dice has 30 sides and values of 1-30, the other dice has 40 sides and values of 1-40. What is the probability of the first dice rolling a higher number than the second dice?

How to approach the group-level technical round?

Here's a few tips to ace this round: 

• Make sure you are familiar with the basics of architecture, scalability, and performance optimization.
• Familiarize yourself with the fundamentals of app design and think about how you would approach these problems in a real-world scenario.
• As the third round also focuses on analytical questions, puzzles, and probability, it's important to prepare yourself with practice questions and keep your problem-solving skills sharp.
• Practice, practice, practice: The more you practice, the better prepared you will be for the interview. Try solving different types of puzzles and probability problems, and consider taking mock technical interviews to get a sense of what to expect. Schedule an interview with Prepfully experts for success!

C. R&D VP level

This round mostly revolves around logical questions and a few more high-level systems design questions. You can also expect questions that evaluate your critical thinking skills and ability to solve complex problems.

Some questions you might encounter include:

• Design a Drag & Drop app.
• Design a URL shortening system.
• Design an ecommerce platform that can handle high traffic volume.
• Build a recommendation system that provides personalized recommendations to users.
• How would you design a system that can handle a high volume of real-time requests?
• What would you do to make a video-sharing website highly scalable?
• Design a scalable and fault-tolerant system for a social media platform.
• Build a chat app and to describe the app architecture

During this round as well, you can expect the questions to be heavily focused on analytical questions such as puzzles or probability rather than coding challenges. For example,

There are 3 people on the edges of a triangle and they independently flip a coin for their next direction. What's the probability that they don't have any overlap? What happens if it is 4 people on a square? Or 5 on a pentagon?

• A company has 100 employees, of which 80% are software engineers. If 50 employees are currently on a project, what is the minimum number of software engineers on the project?
• You have a basket with 100 balls of which 90 are blue and 10 are red. You randomly select 3 balls, what's the probability of getting 2 blue and 1 red ball?

How to approach the R&D VP round?

The focus of this round is on your ability to provide innovative and practical solutions to real-world challenges in the software engineering field. So, be prepared to articulate your thought process every step of the way and share relevant experiences that demonstrate your technical acumen.

As for the logical or probability-based questions,  have a clear and structured approach towards the problem. Make sure you have a good grasp of the problem you're trying to solve and break down the problem into smaller sub-problems. This will simplify the problem and make it easier to solve.

If you want to check out and prepare for questions that are a tad tougher and might help you feel more confident about your prep - you can check out our guides on AirBnb Software Engineering Interview as well as the Uber Software Engineering interviews.

Once you're through the technical interviews, you'll meet with the HR who will find a suitable position for you and introduce you to your team.

The HR might ask you questions like "Can you discuss your preferred work hours and schedule?" or "Can you share your salary expectations?" or "What are your long-term career goals?" to get an idea of your working style and career vision. 

The HR will also discuss the company's benefits, culture, and opportunities for growth. 

Use this opportunity to ask any questions you may have about the company and the role. For instance, 

• What is the team structure and what is the day-to-day work like for a software engineer at Fiverr?
• How does Fiverr support professional development and career growth for its employees?
• What is the typical work schedule and work-life balance like at the company?
• Can you tell me more about the current projects the team is working on?
• How does the company approach diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace?