Docusign

Role: Software Engineer (General)

College: Not Specified

Interview Date: April 03, 2020

Interview Type: Full-Time

Result: Not Specified (Implied Rejected)

Difficulty: Easy for phone, Medium for some onsite questions, Hard for puzzle comprehension

Rounds: 1 Phone Interview, 4 Onsite Interviews

Topics Asked: Data Structures, Algorithms, Puzzles, System Design

Experience:

This candidate shared their experience interviewing with DocuSign, noting the challenges of interviewing during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Phone Interview:
The question was "Adding two numbers in a linked list" (similar to LeetCode's Add Two Numbers). The candidate wrote the code, found a bug, and pointed it out to the interviewer.

Onsite Interviews (4+ hours, after lunch, in Seattle office):
The onsite interviews started after lunchtime and lasted over 4 hours. The candidate noted the office environment felt like a sanitarium.

Round 1 (Manager):
The first interview was with a manager who primarily focused on selling the job and did not ask any real technical questions.

Round 2 (Technical - Puzzle/Recursion):
An interviewer presented a puzzle that took some time to understand. Once understood, it was a simple recursion with backtracking. The candidate wrote most of the code. The interviewer incorrectly stated the complexity as quadratic when it was exponential, which the candidate explained and the interviewer accepted. The puzzle itself was described as simple once understood, but unfamiliar.

Round 3 (Technical - Algorithms):
The next question was about finding prime numbers under 'n'. The candidate wrote a simple algorithm to keep a list of primes and divide numbers by existing primes. The code was bug-free and took about 10 minutes. Discussions followed on optimizations like the Sieve of Eratosthenes. The candidate finished early and asked for another question, but the interviewer declined.

Round 4 (Technical - System Design/Data Structures):
This interviewer asked to design a key-value store. The candidate offered options like using a database or a log and a hash table in memory, discussing pros and cons. The interviewer seemed disengaged, making the discussion difficult.
The final question was about finding unique words in a file.