How to Ace a Software Engineering Interview at Vestmark

So I know this type of stuff is supposed to be top secret. However, I subscribe to the philosophy of radical candor with my team, which extends to future team members.

An interview at Vestmark won’t be that different from other interviews you have done. There will be no crazy questions like what would you do if you were shrunk down to the size of a nickel and placed in a blender. Our interviews consist of four parts: culture fit, general programming and debugging skills, a software design portion, and digging into your knowledge of specific technologies.

Culture Fit

So the easiest but probably most important part of the interview is the culture fit portion. We have an amazing and diverse group of people who work with us. Every time we do employee engagement surveys, the #1 reason why people say they like working at Vestmark is their teammates. We win awards year after year as one of the best places to work in Boston. So to pass an interview at Vestmark you need to come across as someone who we want to work alongside. It is pretty easy to do so if you embody our core values.

We Before Me

That means looking out for others, not just yourself. At Vestmark, we know we are stronger as a team than we are as a collection of individuals.

Positive Energy

This doesn’t mean you need to be all sunshine and rainbows. It means that fundamentally you recognize that Yoda was right. If you don’t believe you can succeed, that will be the reason why you will fail. My favorite word to use in performance reviews to describe the behavior of people on my team is alacrity. That means “brisk and cheerful readiness.”

Knowledge Explorer

Congratulations, you are going to display this one with ease. This core value is all about a willingness to learn and grow. We all face challenges each day that no one has ever seen before. There isn’t a user manual for what we do. So it would be helpful if you had displayed an openness to new information and the tenacity to dig and discover the solution. We love to learn. So it will go a long way if you teach us something during the interview or tell us about a unique way you have seen technology used to solve a problem.

Own It

This core value is all about being accountable to your teammates. If you push a commit for a new feature, follow up on it to make sure it works. Don’t just throw it over the wall and hope for the best. If it does break something, which does happen sometimes, then own up to it and just fix it. At Vestmark, we take responsibility for the success of our team and the company, not just the ticket we were assigned.

Programming and Debugging

The technical portions of our interviews are pretty standard. You are going to probably want to review commonly asked Java Interview Questions. There is no point in my rehashing those because there are so many resources available on that.

Then we will likely have you use an online compiler to code out a standard whiteboard problem. Basically, we are just checking can you actually write code. I highly suggest you start by asking a few questions to make sure you understand the problem. Bonus points will be awarded if you ask about how an edge case or two should be handled. No matter the solution you come up with, we will ask to improve it or expand upon it. Doing this is to check to see how well you respond to feedback and if you can work collaboratively with the interviewers. Whiteboard problems like this aren’t to see if you can memorize an ideal solution but to see your problem-solving skills in action.

We look for how well you:

• Gather and internalize requirements
• Explain your solution and think through problems
• Deal with feedback and criticism

System Design

The next portion of the interview will be about system design. We will give you an idea for an application and ask you how you would build it. It would be best if you considered things like the database structure and the different technologies you would use. Be sure to take into account how the system will scale as usage increases and how easily it can be extended as more features get added to the system over time. Like the commonly asked Java questions, there are plenty of resources around the internet to review for practicing these problems. For example, this one came up as the first result in a search.

Digging into Specific Technologies

The last portion of the interview is the most challenging to prepare for because we dig into your knowledge about specific technologies. If you mention on your resume that you are an expert in Hibernate, you can expect to be asked a couple of questions to display that. You can expect this for almost any technology that you listed on your resume that aligns with something we mention in the job description. We may dig into some of the nuances of working with relational databases regarding concurrency, locking mechanisms, and so on. This is where you get to display your enthusiasm for technology in general and how you go about learning it. It is better you admit you don’t know something and be genuinely curious about the answer rather than try to spout a long-winded rambling guess you hope is close.

Wrap up

That covers all the portions of the interview. Remember to review those core values because showing those will help you out of almost any situation where you get stuck. Be humble and thoughtful in your answers. It helps if you spend a little time researching the company so you can ask those thoughtful questions and display genuine interest in joining the Vestmark team. Just writing this post is a great first step towards that. Keep in mind; we want you to succeed and pass the interview so you can join our team. Good luck.

See Vestmark’s openings: https://www.vestmark.com/careers#open-positions