I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Affirm in May 2024
Interview
Pretty much described in all the previous reviews.
1. Phone screen with recruiter to understand the role.
2. Tech phone screen - Live coding. (See questions below)
3. Virtual onsite (same day) - live coding, system's design and behavioral questions with hiring manager.
Interviewed for a remote role in Europe, but interviewers were from different Affirm offices like Canada, Spain and Poland. Everyone was super nice and professional. Both my recruiter and the recruiting coordinator were always responsive and clarified every step of the process. I would recommend to apply and see if the role is a match!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
- Implement a function to filter data. I liked that it was not a basic leet code problem.
- Basic leet code problem string compression/decompression exercise.
- System's design problem related to a potential feature used at Affirm.
- Standard behavioral interview questions.
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Affirm in Feb 2022
Interview
The interview process was a phone screen followed by the option to do a one hour technical coding session or a take home assignment. I opted to do the take home assignment since it represents how developers work in the real world. Plus I don't do well being put under a microscope and expecting to output a perfect answer when the interviewer is holding the answers. I've been on both sides and it's not fun. I thought it was great they gave you the option to do a take home or a tech call.
I must have passed because the final stage was a virtual on-site interview (6 hour zoom call) with several different people from across the company. The discouraging part was two of those sessions were technical interviews - seriously? I spent three hours coding the take home assignment, gave them my GitHub showcasing real world libraries that have tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of downloads and you're going to make me do live technical interviews anyways? Super annoying and felt like my time was wasted. A six hour interview marathon is something I'd expect from Google or Facebook. Not a smaller company like this.
Lesson learned though - opt for the live coding call over the take home assignment to save yourself some time because they will make you code live anyways. It's a broken system across the industry and I have never done well in them but I produce great code/projects regardless.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a scalable system to ingest loan data and send it to different teams for internal consumption.
