I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at HubSpot in Feb 2025
Interview
It started with the 3 hour take-home. This was actually pretty difficult and was a leetcode question in disguise as a json manipulation problem despite them saying they don't like leetcode problems. I'd say it was equivalent to a leetcode hard in terms of difficulty. I passed that and then had 2 onsites, the coding and system design. The coding went great, The interviewer was super friendly and I passed. With the system design, however, I agree with others in that it felt more like an interrogation. I answered with every deep dive from hellointerview since I know what the question was going to be beforehand, It felt as if the interviewer was trying to trip me up and didn't feel as if we were working together. He also kept interrupting me very frequently and refused to let me take the lead in building my solution. He got very hung up on whether the video metadata should be stored in sql vs no sql, which I don't think was particularly relevant to the problem but I believe that was the reason I ended up failing when I said I don't think it matters that much. It felt like the interview was being given in bad faith with no intention of passing me. In my meta interview a few weeks prior they kept emphasizing that sql vs nosql isn't really a relevant debate anymore so it made it very hard to navigate this interview when the interviewer had a specific solution in mind and was not open to hearing me out. Even if knowing someone missing one minor part of the system was failure I would not have taken this interview knowing they were that picky. Nobody is designing Netflix perfectly in 45 minutes and I feel like I got my time and effort wasted.
I applied online. The process took 3 days. I interviewed at HubSpot in Oct 2024
Interview
I would never interview for this company again. Initially I was disappointed when I received the rejection email, but after going over the feedback I was happy I didn’t get through. It’s pure waste of time.
All the questions you can find on Glassdoor:
1. Take home Screening - you need to write code to consume data from an API, do some processing and send the processed data to another API that validates your message. You can request sample data for testing purposes, actual data is huge. For the same reason, this one requires a bit of luck too because debugging can be challenging given that the final API you send the message to doesn’t provide a lot of information.
2. Coding - merge 2 sorted arrays upto length K. I wrote a very optimized code, yet I was given a NO for this round. The reasons behind this were very stupid and they define those reasons as “High bar”.
2. System design round 1 - design Netflix - though I drew all systems and answered all questions, even the difficult ones. They changed the requirements in the middle and then I was told I needed too many prompts and that’s why they had a NO for this round.
2. System design 2 - weather system design. This went well. Got a YES
The recruiter was really professional and helps you at every stage.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Netflix and weather app system design.
Merge 2 sorted arrays upto length k.
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at HubSpot (Dublin, Dublin)
Interview
It was easy and the interviewers were very friendly. 1 Coding interview, 2 System Design interviews, 1 Behavioral interview. Most of them just required discussions and asking questions, not very complicated.