Our interview process is designed to help us assess whether candidates would be a good fit for our company and open roles, as well as help candidates understand what it’s like to work on our team. We focus holistically on candidates’ alignment with our core values and their ability to work and operate under a high standard of excellence. All our interviews are performed remotely via Zoom.
(1) Conversation with the hiring manager
The first step of our interview process is an initial conversation with the hiring Engineering Manager. This session will focus on your background, skills, and relevant work history. We’ll discuss the projects and outcomes you’ve driven in your prior roles. As part of this conversation, we’ll tell you more about TrunkTools, expectations for the role, and leave ample time for your own questions.
In this round, you’ll meet with a senior engineer on our team to review, understand, and refactor a small section of TypeScript code. You will screenshare your work from your own laptop. Please prepare by having Docker and your preferred code editor set up for this session.
While we are in the business of applied AI and use LLM-equipped coding tools extensively internally, we still expect our software engineers to know how to code. We place a high value on candidates’ understanding of programming fundamentals, so during this and all other technical screens, we will ask you to write your own code (instead of relying on an agent).
Following our technical screen, we have candidates attend two separate panel interview sessions: a full-stack interview and a system design exercise. Both sessions will be attended by a panel of two senior engineers.
Our full-stack interview covers candidate’s familiarity with implementing features across the breadth of a TypeScript and Express codebase. We’ll ask you to work through implementation of a small feature end-to-end, starting from a React component, handling state management, API calls, backend controller and service changes, and interaction with a database.
In the system design exercise, we’ll ask candidates to diagram an architecture for a hypothetical eCommerce application using a shared Zoom whiteboard. We’ll be focused on assessing the candidate’s broad familiarity with how web applications are structured and built.
As a last step in our process before the offer phase, we schedule a short conversation with our CTO. This session is more informal, covering shared alignment, fit, and answering any remaining questions about TrunkTools or engineering culture.