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      Zillow

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      Senior Database Developer Interview

      10 Feb 2015
      Anonymous employee
      Seattle, WA
      Accepted offer
      Positive experience
      Average interview

      Application

      I applied online. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Zillow (Seattle, WA) in Jan 2015

      Interview

      Phase One - Phone screening by recruiter. Asked some basic questions designed to determine that the candidate was suitable to pass on to tech reviewer. It took some time to get to this point after being notified I was selected for review - I think this particular recruiter was in over her head. Phase Two - Detailed phone screening by database engineer. The person I talked to was very friendly and made it more of a professional assessment of both my knowledge and attitudes toward the skills associated with my career than a detailed grilling. He seemed pretty encouraging; I was passed to phase three about five minutes after the end. Phase Three - A series of four one-on-one interviews - three with top database engineers and the fourth with the team development manager. The first hour consisted of schema design and query optimization principles - very well done and with excellent assessment questions. The second hour was mostly focused on the inner workings of SQL Server and concepts that separate senior developers from junior and mid-level devs. He fired off a lot of canned questions as well as some personal introspection questions and was very enjoyable. The third hour focused on query skills and was led by an interviewer who was very honest about being unprepared and distracted by an upcoming trip. The final hour (with the team lead) was more standard "how well do you play with others in the sandbox" questions. This was important in that I got a sense of a co-worker I would be working directly with, if not supervised by. She asked numerous thoughtful questions about work environment issues and that sort of thing and was - importantly to me - very likable. After the final interview my new recruiter (who was much more on the ball than the original one) introduced herself and asked some follow-up questions and finished with a tour of the facility. Aside from the initial recruiter who seemed to keep losing my reply emails to requests for information (to be fair, I was told she was no longer with Zillow by the end of the process, so factor her out of the process subsequently) I found everyone to be friendly, professional and very encouraging. I especially appreciated my second recruiter who was constantly upbeat, communicative and friendly. She kept having to report delays in the final decision process from early projections but was apologetic and appreciative of my understanding of the delays. I felt as though she celebrated as much as I when contacting me with the offer. On the whole it was a very memorable and enjoyable experience and would have been so even if I had not been given an offer.

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      Most of the questions were detailed and specific; very difficult to reproduce with any justice here
      Answer question

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