I applied online. I interviewed at Chess.com in Jun 2026
Interview
The application process is so long, it feels like an interview, with multiple questions that that take an extremely long time to review and answer. Even though I have 17 years of experience in the industry, worked at companies that are part of their tech stack and am an expert in most of it, they immediately rejected me. They do not respect engineers time.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
A bare-metal database server (64-core, 512GB RAM, 8x NVMe in RAID-10) is experiencing write latency spikes every 20 minutes that last ~30 seconds. Application logs show query timeouts during these windows. You SSH into the box. What specific commands do you run to determine whether the issue is filesystem journaling, a RAID rebuild, swap activity, or a runaway background process flushing dirty pages? For each potential cause, state the one-liner that confirms or rules it out.
You are provisioning a new bare-metal host with two 25Gbps NICs that must provide redundancy and aggregate throughput for a game server handling 200k concurrent TCP connections. Describe: (a) which bonding mode you choose and why (b) the exact content of the netplan or ifcfg config file you would write (c) how you verify the bond is active and both interfaces are participating (d) how you test failover without impacting production traffic during the validation window.
A bare-metal host running a game relay service starts refusing new TCP connections after reaching ~120k concurrent sessions, despite having ample CPU and memory headroom. The application logs cannot assign requested address or too many open files. List the specific kernel parameters and OS-level settings (with values) you would check and adjust to support 500k concurrent connections on a single host. Explain what each one controls and the risk of setting it too high.
The first step is a recruiter interview.
Then there is a general technical interview without codding.
After that they give you a testing assignment of a medium size.
Then there is a second technical interview where they will ask to modify your assignment and ask some questions about the assignment.
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Chess.com (Valencia, Valencian Community) in May 2026
Interview
He tenido la primera entrevista con HR, es solo un primer contacto, no te preoguntan nada, solo envié la info que necesitaban saber por email, y esta entrevista solo fue para contarme de la cultura y programar una entrevista mas tecnica con el Product Designer lead