I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Mercor (San Francisco, CA) in Jun 2026
Interview
Spoke with an engineer. They ask you random questions like what's the slowest sort algorithm and its time complexity and have you code-review two functions. They make their entire decisions in 5 minutes.
Engineer was quite smug and wanted to leave the conversation after 10 minutes.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What's the slowest sort algorithm.
Review this piece of code.
First one was about a string concatenation
Second was writing to a db
First round: phone screen - I had a phone screen with the team, the format is a 30 min Q&A based technical questions mainly revolved around data structure and algorithms and code optimization.
Recruiter call for the first stage, and then AI bot interview, has leetcode style question and some technical questions, and then Super day, mine is virtual onsite, 5 hours in total, system design + coding + vibe coding
