I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Axon (Seattle, WA) in Feb 2016
Interview
Technical phone screen using collabedit and in-person interview loop of whiteboard coding exercises for Evidence.com.
Sadly, the Axon office in Seattle is predominantly an ex-microsoftee "bro" camp of lemmings still unintelligently misusing the out-dated and largely irrelevant (beyond recent college grads) CS Jeopardy! trivia contest "process".
Literally no comprehension of a candidate's directly applicable, proven, real-life experience.
Discard / tase your resume before entering this office.
They are looking for recent college grads / people that worked at GAM companies and like to re-invent a new wheel each month - depending on which direction the constantly changing wind blows from management.
Everyone here described "constant change" as the key characteristic of the office...
Disorganized office - in retrospect, this is clearly visible in the job descriptions - they have no idea what they are doing (nor really what they are going to do) in this office.
Low quality system design - constantly breaking down.
Several interviewers seem to have no knowledge of OO basics - they do want people that enjoy hacking things together as quickly as possible.
Basically, this is a prototyping shop since they prefer to use as many different technologies over time as possible.
You may hear some questionable or obtuse comments from interviewers like "ActiveMQ can only process 6 messages/sec because of the complexity of the AMQP protocol" or "It's really difficult to pass function pointers in Java."
One of the "senior" interviewers seems intentionally difficult to communicate with.
I.e., likes to say "yup, yup, got you" but clearly doesn't understand basic explanations of things until several repetitions have been made.
Cyclical Taser & Axon business is driven by violent events, major patent infringement lawsuit against Taser in progress, and now alleged bribes, jobs, & trips given to public officials to land contracts - news of this last year as well it appears. Search on "Taser bribes".
Where there's smoke...
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
Phone screen: Best way to search 50K files for a phone number that would be needed "soon", within 2 days.
Collabedit coding exercise: convert Roman numeral strings to integer.
Use of a real IDE (copy & paste to out-dated collabedit window) not allowed.
Basic design exercise: design a system to replace their indexing service which collects data from micro-services and feeds it into SOLR (future: Elastic Search because reportedly Solr indexes go bad & don't support re-indexing)
- feed any updates to relevant data stores quickly into SOLR / Elastic Search
- include process (re-indexing service / logic) to collect all xx million records from micro-services and feed into SOLR / ES
- what is the "data contract" for a micro-service to support the re-index process
Whiteboard coding exercise (trivia from the Jeopardy "Graph category"):
- write code for a 3-letter "word ladder" to find the length of the shortest sequence to get from "hit" to "cog" (if there is a valid sequence) where only one letter in the word can be changed with each step through the words in the "set".
start = "hit"
end = "cog"
set = ["hot","dot","dog","lot","log"]
expected path: hit -> hot -> dot -> dog -> log -> cog
Whiteboard coding exercise (more trivia from the Jeopardy "Graphics processing category"):
- write code for a function to copy a rectangle in an image from one location to another
- this is like moving a window in a window manager, but the original window image can be left there
- inputs: char [][] image, Rectangle (x,y,width, height) toCopy, Point (x,y) destination
- image character array is ok for illustration purposes
- 0,0 in top, left
- do basic copy process
- what happens when the destination is inside the rectangle to copy?
- when does the original data get damaged?
- add logic to copy the rectangle properly (prevent damage to the image data)
- how to erase the original rectangle from the image
- this was referred to as the "bit blit" algo - but am not finding a decent example of code for this on the web at first glance
Whiteboard coding exercise (even more irrelevant trivia):
- write code to solve 9x9 Sudoku (brute force frowned on)
System Design Technical Screening: I had a screening interview with a very biased interviewer. He did not provide an exact question or clear requirements to work on. He started with one system-related topic, then later jumped to another topic. He seemed to intentionally make the conversation convoluted and made it seem as though I was the one who did not understand the question he asked. The interviewer should have provided pre-written requirements; instead, the process felt very unfair. I spent 10 days preparing for this interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Something similar to Logging System (Kafka, Apache Spark]
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 days. I interviewed at Axon (Seattle, WA) in Apr 2026
Interview
The interview process was terrible, the senior recruiter had no respect to the candidate and extremely lack of professionalism. He sent me an invite which specifically marked a phone call as the meeting method. 10 minutes passed the scheduled time, there was no call and no message, I sent an email asking if he still intended to have the meeting and still no reply, after that I checked LinkedIn and found he shoot me an message asking me to join the zoom meeting, when I joined he already left. I sent him a linkedin message clarifying this, and used the original schedule email to request a new meeting on one of his available spots, still he just ghosted with no communication.
One of the worst recruiter I have met in my 20+ year career.
Coincidently some time back another recruiter from the company pinged me about opportunity with the company, I checked the company's career site, and mentioned one specific position that I was mostly interested. Afterwards there was no reply whatsoever. The repeated pattern shows the true nature how the company treats its candidate, reflecting how it would treat its employees. Absolutely terrible!
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Axon
Interview
The interview process involved 5 total interviews. A systems design screening followed by 4 interviews (2 coding, 1 system design, 1 behavioral), with one of them being on site. The process was overall very smooth with fast follow-up between the screen and full interview scheduling. The recruiter was transparent, and the interviewers were all involved during the interviews, following lines of thinking and asking probing questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
A realistic data structures question with multiple parts
