Our interview process is designed to be efficient. At each phase, we will be quick to make decisions and will be transparent about our thinking.

Phone screen

This stage is a more informal call to get to know more about the role, and for you to evaluate whether it’s a good fit for you. We are looking for people with a strong interest in startups and motivation to help them; this is usually exhibited by past experience working at or starting one yourself.

The conversation will cover some light technical discussion about backend development and your past experience. Mostly, we want to know that you can code and ship fairly involved systems, and speak to them with clarity on the details. This tends to be a good indication that an engineer had strong ownership and showed autonomy in making product or technical decisions.

Technical screen

Our first technical screen can be either remote or in-person, and is intended as a first pass to assess basic programming web skills (which is core to what we do here!) You’ll work on a 1-hour practical programming problem, implementing a back-end web service similar to a todo app: https://todobackend.com/

For this project, you should have a full stack web environment set up AND a relational database already running on your machine. Here at Openlayer, we use React with Next.js, but Angular or anything else you’re familiar with works. To make the most of the time, you should have a working project set up before the interview. 

During the interview, you’re also free to use LLMs or Google for syntax. We believe this helps developers feel more comfortable during the process, and avoids any learning curve or limitations of 3rd party platforms (Coderpen, etc.). While you are welcome to use AI to help with code completion, we’ve found it often adds noise to the interview process.

Founders chat

A lot of the work we do involves close collaboration with the founders of Openlayer. To this end, the next step in our process is to have a chat with a founder.

They’ll dive deep into your own background/interests. In particular, many of these discussions focus on your past experience in fast-paced environments, working in ambiguous environments and focusing on building impactful products and systems.

This is also a great opportunity to learn more about Openlayer and what we do here, as well as why it’s a pretty unique place to build software. As always, come prepared with great questions!

On-site interviews

The interview process is a deeper dive into technical abilities, product thinking and overall fit. For the “fit” portion, we are again looking for ownership and autonomy, but we also dig deeper into communication. This is evaluated throughout the process -- in how you communicate your approach, solutions and overall thinking. 

Each interview is 1 hour long, with 45 minutes allocated for the technical portion, and 10-15 minutes for Q&A. We don’t always do all the interviews, and we take it on a case-by-case basis. 

Each interview in more detail:

• Programming exercise. Similar to the technical screen, we will ask one or more short language-agnostic coding questions, and you are welcome to use whatever development environment you prefer. We are interested in hearing how you approach the problem; seeing how you write, test, and debug the solution; and then discussing the tradeoffs of your solution, and how they turned out.
• Debugging. Working with existing code is required for most engineers, so we’ve built an interview to test for it. You’ll be given code to debug and fix, and communicate your process of doing so. Please let us know your programming language of choice beforehand. If the debugging problem has issues (getting it to run on your local), we have a backup API design question. 
• React exercise. In this exercise, you’ll be reading from an API endpoint and building a simple user interface. You’ll iterate on it to style the output, and then enable user interactions, if time allows. It’s helpful if your environment is set up to do frontend development and javascript-based API calls. We use React here, but if you know Vue or something else well, that’s fine too. 
• Final founder interview. Again, everyone on the software team works extensively with founders. They’ll ask about your motivations and interests and share more about engineering at Openlayer.

We schedule the in-person round at our SF office, and we’ll provide lunch for you to get to know more of the team. (We’ll cover costs of travel and accommodations if needed.) We do not guarantee the full round of interviews above and we sometimes short-circuit the process if we think it’s not a good fit. 

We have found that going through this process gives us enough to make a go/no-go decision. We offer feedback to candidates who request it, and relate the feedback to the skills, qualification and interview process above. 

Timing

The typical interview process takes 2-3 weeks from start to finish, but we have accommodated as short as one week. We are happy to accommodate candidates who might have a short timeline or competing offers. The more information you can share about your situation and where you are in the process, the more we can either attempt to expedite/match, or save you time if we cannot.