Status: Junior, BS CS Top 20 CS school
Position: SWE Intern at Indeed
Location: Remote
Date: Oct 2020

1st Technical phone screen (1 hour):

I had my first round interview for SWE Intern at Indeed a few weeks ago. The overall recruiting process is slightly different from other SWE intern positions that I have applied before.

For the first round, they outsourced it to Karat. The interviewer first asked me to pick two topics out of 5 (object oriented programming, frontend programming, QA testing, database, system) and asked me conceptual questions on the two topics that I picked.

After that, I was asked two coding questions (both of them are under the "Indeed" tag on Leetcode!). The interviewer will provide you with the code in main() so that you can run your code as you debug. Throughout the process the interviewer didn't really say much other than confirming that he has recorded what I said. I spent a lot of time debugging my code for the first question and didn't get to finish coding the second question.

Overall, the interview was ok but I do feel like the interviewer is just there to check off a evaluation form about things that I did/didn't accomplish throughout the interview. I wish there were more support from the interviewer when I am stuck, but it is also reasonable because they might not be able to fairly "grade" me if they helped out too much.

Virtual Onsite Interviews
About a week later, the recruiter reached out to me through email saying that I passed the first round and will be moved onto the virtual onsite interviews. The next steps are a coding assessment, a technical interview with Indeed engineers, and a 15-minute Q&A session with a Indeed engineer. Everything is scheduled on the following week.

Coding assessment (90 minutes)
The online coding assessment is conducted through Hackerrank. There were 5 questions asked based on the one coding problem. Only one of the 5 questions required coding, while the other 4 were mainly based on the design and complexity of your solution.

Technical interview (60 minutes)
There were only one question asked, but the interviewer will continue asking you to optimize your solution. My first solution had a bad time complexity, but came up with a significantly better solution very quickly. The interviewer was really nice and constantly encouraged me to optimize the time/space complexity. At the end of the interview, I had around 7 minutes to ask questions about the internship/Indeed.

Q&A session (15 minutes)
This session is a great chance for you to ask anything you want to know about the company and the internship. I prepared a lot of questions in advance, so the conversation was nice and smooth.

Update:
I got an offer after two months of waiting!