How our interview process works
At Mechanize we have a streamlined interview process that can be completed fully remotely. There are 2 stages, consisting of 4.5 hours in total. We encourage candidates to schedule each stage at the earliest time that works for them. We’re often able to accommodate same-day scheduling, and the entire process can be completed within 2 days.
After you submit your application, we will review it and decide whether to advance you to the first stage. If we decide to advance you, we’ll invite you to schedule the first interview stage at a time that works for you.
Stage 1: Intro call and technical screen (30 minutes)
We start the call by having a conversation with you about the company.
After that, we ask if you’re comfortable with a brief technical screening. If you are, we will ask you a quick sequence of short-answer questions about real software engineering topics relevant to the technologies we use at Mechanize. Each question has a simple, objective answer, and we move through them quickly, roughly one question every 20 seconds.
We think this structure, while unusual, is more predictive of real software engineering ability than traditional leetcode questions, which often have very little relevance to what engineers actually do on the job. The entire screening takes less than 10 minutes and covers a variety of topics. Our goal is to make the interviewing process efficient and minimize the time you have to spend in interviews.
We ask that you do not use AI or search engines to help you answer questions during this stage.
Stage 2: Take-home project (4 hours)
We ask you to implement a web app within 3 hours. You are allowed to use AI coding tools to help you. Afterwards, if we think you made sufficient progress on the assignment, we will take a 1 hour call with you and ask you questions about the code you produced. The goal is to assess whether you’re capable of making rapid progress on software engineering tasks and whether you understand your own code.
Please note that, to be efficient, we might end an interview early if we think there is no further point in continuing it.
Offer
If you pass both stages, we will likely make you an offer to work at Mechanize as a software engineer. We encourage you to start as soon as possible, and we can usually accommodate a start date as early as the day after you receive your offer.
Before you apply, you can also read about what working at Mechanize is like.