The first round of the interview was conducted via video call. During this session, the interviewer asked me a technical question about how I would identify and remove unused code from a company's codebase. Personally, I don’t think this is a particularly strong interview question—it's quite specific and not very applicable across different engineering roles. Unless someone has direct experience with codebase cleanup or large-scale refactoring, they’re unlikely to know the details. Moreover, since the company is a high-frequency trading firm, removing code is generally rare and often avoided due to the high risk of unintended consequences.

Applied through a 3rd party recruiter. Was sent an OA on Hackerrank. The problem itself was on the level of LC Med-Hard, not terribly difficult in and of itself, however you are under a tight time constraint and unlike LC there is the extra burden of parsing and validating I/O, which in any real-world program occupies only a tiny fraction the code, but here occupied an inordinate amount of time implementing. Wasted too much time messing with this and not the actual algorithm, which was relatively straightforward, and could not complete it in time. It is obvious that these sorts of places prize speed over all else, and filter for competitive programmer types vs actual working SWEs.