I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Upstart (Seattle, WA) in Jan 2026
Interview
Initial: phone interview about resume and experience(alignment).
second: CodeSignal coding challenge. The questions are on the easy side but the time allocated is very tinny. They want you to come up with a perfect answer within a short period of time.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. Sorting anagrams into a bucket( a LeetCode problem).
2. given an encoded string, return decoded string
Call with recruiter who is very friendly.
Second call with the hiring manager which is 1 hour split in half to talk your projects and do a coding question. Went way over time but we got along great.
Third call was another hour long interview for 2 coding questions. 1 was a leetcode medium and the other was probably a leetcode hard. Definitely not enough time to solve both and the interviewer was acting like the hour was enough time for both questions and a 10 min Q&A. The second question was unclear and the interviewer was not even aware of the scope he was asking.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Upstart
Interview
The first step was a phone screen with a recruiter, just standard behavioral and “why do you want to work here?” questions. The next step was a behavioral and technical interview with a senior engineer.
The interviewer was pretty friendly overall but clearly did not like some of my answers (I work at a smaller company and we don’t necessarily follow all the best practices, though I described what best practices are. Lesson learned about being honest).
The recruiter had told me the LeetCode problem would be medium, but it seemed closer to easy. I went over time a bit (though we got started late), and I had to look up some syntax I don’t use regularly. The stated purpose of the exercise was to “see how I think,” but we all know that it looks better if you just solve it without looking much of anything up, and I’m sure others solved the problem more quickly. I got a rejection email the following week with no specific feedback.
The next step would have been a 5-hour virtual onsite, which I was kind of dreading anyway, especially given that I was being moved forward by other companies with equally rigorous but less time-intensive interviews. Some of what the interviewer told me about the division also gave me pause. Again, the interviewer was quite nice. While I think watching someone solve a LeetCode problem yields information that’s about as useful as a die roll and in fact tends to select for undesirable traits, it would not have been a good fit, and I appreciate that the interviewer was upfront about the company’s successes and challenges.
