I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Kizen (Austin, TX) in Jan 2026
Interview
Recruiter reached out via LinkedIn and called me. There are two rounds, first with the VP of Engineering for half an hour which is more like screening. The next round is an hour and half technical with the Director of Engineering that test on various aspects such as Python, Devops/Kubernetes, Postgres and SQL. Kizen is heavy on Postgres SQL and its performance is critical to them.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What happens when you delete a Pod in Kubernetes? Estimate table size
given 4 fields that will have 1M rows. And then how do you accurately
calculate table size? Consider row overhead bytes for id, bool, name, timestamp.
How does declarative paritioning works in Postgres?
What is MVCC in Postgres? What is pg_stat_activity. Explain effect of NULL on average calculation
Inner JOIN vs LEFT JOIN; Process vs Thread; what is list comprehension in python? Name a few standard library functions in python; what happens when you execute www.yahoo,com?
For SQL coding, they will provide a scenario with some git metadata tables filled with sample data. You have to write SQL to get result where commits changed at least 2 files, c++ files and a readme file.