I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Salesforce (San Francisco, CA) in Oct 2019
Interview
I started my interview process talking to 4 teams however communication was very smooth as I spoke primarily with 1 recruiter at this point. After the initial phone call with the recruiter I moved on with 3 of the teams that most interested me.
I asked questions about the specifics of each team from my recruiter and all questions were answered extremely well.
The process moved fairly quickly early on. Each screen with the recruiter + hiring manager was scheduled quickly. Feedback was provided back really quickly too.
After this stage the process slowed down a tiny bit mostly because of my schedule of interviews with other companies. I was given one three hour take home that could be used to advance to the on-site round for all of the teams. I completed the take home over the weekend. I received feedback fairly quickly that all the managers wanted to move forward to the on-site round.
At this point I was instructed to select 2 teams to do the on-site with. The recruiting team was very helpful in deciding.
Scheduling the onsite was the next step. The recruiter offered various options to fit my schedule and eventually we scheduled both on-sites on the same day a week out. I had some scheduling conflicts and personal emergencies so we re-scheduled it once.
The onsite was a very pleasant experience but also tiring. In the morning 3 back to back interviews with one team + lunch with the manager of team 1, and in the afternoon 4 back to back interviews for the other team. One thing that caught me off guard was that I was told the onsite would not be technical because I had already done the remote take home and that any questions of this nature would be about my take home. At first this was surprising to me but I decided it did not matter because I was interviewing at other companies as well so either way I was prepping for onsites. When onsite for Salesforce however every single interviewer was technical and no one talked to me about the take home exercise.
I told the first couple of interviewers that I was told there would be no technical questions but they seemed confused when I told them this. One interviewer said something like "This is for a software engineer position so ...why wouldn't I ask you technical questions" and my bringing this up seemed to create a bad impression of me. After this I did not communicate this mismatch in expectation with other interviewers for the rest of the day. Regardless, each interviewer was friendly and easy to talk to and really smart.
After the onsite feedback was delivered back very quickly. One team rejected me (the one from the morning) and the other team wanted to move forward to offer stage.
Moving forward with this team we negotiated several aspects of the offer. It seems that there would not have been too much room for negotiation if I had not had another offer from a different company. Communication was very open and crystal clear for this part.
After this the recruiter worked really hard with the hiring manager and other execs to get a new offer numbers approved. The offer was then sent out and I was given 5 days to respond.
Throughout the entire interview process I felt heavily supported by my recruiter and it was a pleasure meeting so many amazingly talented individuals.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Recruiter screen: general fit questions and talking about various opportunities. Recruiter genuinely interested in understand what excites you as a candidate and if the team would be a good fit.
Manager screen; Some high level technical questions about Java fundamentals, database fundamentals, and architecture.
Take home: Time take home administered through HackerRank. 3 hours to complete a functional program with 4 key features. Focus was heavy on data structure + algorithm.
Onsites: Each team had 4 interviews so 8 total. One of them was lunch with a hiring manager. The onsite consisted of a mixture of technical and behavior questions. Some straightforward Java fundamentals, some distributed system general high level questions, one leetcode medium to hard seeming difficulty question involving recursion/backtracking concepts, and then some more leetcode medium questions I don't remember too well. Other interviews focused a little bit of front end and a little bit of SQL basics.
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Salesforce (Burlington, MA)
Interview
Hacker Rank Coding Challenge, followed by a phone screen where there were couple of questions around the coding challenge and my resume. Then a 4 hour onsite interview with lot of questions around my resume and white-boarding.
My recruiter Clarice Nesbitt was very helpful and quick to respond in all stages of the process. Overall it was a great experience
I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Salesforce (Dublín, Dublín) in Aug 2019
Interview
Applied online and then got a recruiter call. The whole process took around two month. It includes four remote interviews as the team is not in Dublin at the moment. One behavior question, one coding question, one design question and one combined interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a game
Low level java question
System design