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Technical Screening

The screening process is designed to identify candidates who meet the basic qualifications for a role. This typically involves a review of resumes, cover letters, and any other relevant materials submitted by the candidate.

Goals​

  • Understand experience depth: What has the candidate actually shipped or owned? Did the candidate have product involvement or more purely technical work?
  • Technical: Can the candidate reason through code, systems, and architecture? ask about their experience and opinion with specific technologies.
  • Gauge communication – How clearly do they explain tradeoffs, decisions, and collaboration?
  • Evaluate fit – Would they succeed in your team’s culture, pace, and structure?
  • Determine next steps: any areas that require follow up in the next interviews?

Structure​

  • 0-5 min: Intro and context about the company and the role
  • 5-20: Candidate experience and technical questions
  • 20-50: Code Walkthrough: Candidate PR
  • 50-60: candidate questions and wrap up

Interview Preparation​

Ask the candidate to bring:

  • A recent PR they’ve authored (not co-authored).
  • Ideally one that includes some logic (not just config/test refactor) and includes backend and frontend code (if possible).
  • Safe to share and doesn’t expose confidential information.

[5-20 min] Candidate Experience​

Early Startup Experience​

  • Tell me about your experience working in an early startup environment
    • How many people were on your team? What was your role and how did you contribute to product development?
    • What are some of the most challenging problems you've worked on?
    • If they went through a growth phase, how did they adapt to the changes?
    • How did you make technical decisions (e.g. language, libraries, patterns)?
    • Were you responsible for testing, CI/CD, or production incidents?

✅ Outcome: Are they the author, contributor, or just a participant? Do they understand the tradeoffs they made? What did they learn from the experience?

Collaborative Experience​

  • Tell me about a time you worked with a cross-functional team (e.g. product, design, marketing)
    • How did you communicate and collaborate with other team members?
    • What challenges did you face and how did you overcome them?
    • How do you handle disagreements or conflicts with team members?

✅ Outcome: Can they collaborate across roles? how do they generate alignment? Can they manage conflict?

Technical Experience​

  • Tell me about a project you worked on that you're particularly proud of
    • What was your role and what technologies did you use?
    • What were some of the challenges you faced and how did you overcome them?
    • How did you ensure the quality of your code and the overall product?
  • How do you stay up to date with new technologies and trends in your field?
  • Depending on the candidate skillset, I make some opinionated questions about technologies to see how they think about them

✅ Outcome: Do they break down the problem? Can they explain the rationale behind the decisions? Are their tradeoffs reasonable?

[20-50 min] Code Walkthrough: Candidate PR​

  1. Context Setting (5 min)

Questions

  • What was the goal of this PR?
  • What system or part of the product does it affect?
  • Were you working solo or as part of a team?

✅ Outcome: Understand how well they frame their work and communicate context.

  1. Code Walkthrough & Discussion (15 min)

Ask them to guide you through the PR. As they do, dig into reasoning and tradeoffs with these prompts:

Code Quality & Structure

  • How did you decide on this structure / approach?
  • Were there any edge cases or failure modes you had to handle?
  • Would you structure this differently if it had to scale?

Testing

  • How did you test this?
  • What kinds of bugs would be hardest to catch here?
  • Were there any tests you decided not to write?

Tradeoffs & Collaboration

  • What were the constraints (time, legacy code, tech stack)?
  • Did you get any pushback in review? What did you learn from that?
  • If someone had to maintain this code, what would you want them to know?

✅ Outcome: Gauge depth of reasoning, ability to justify decisions, awareness of testing and maintainability.

  1. Reflection & Improvement (10 min)

Questions

  • Looking back, what would you do differently?
  • Were there follow-ups or improvements you didn’t get to?
  • Was there any tech debt you introduced or cleaned up?

✅ Outcome: Do they reflect critically on their own work? Do they recognize compromise and plan for iteration?

[50-60 min] Candidate Questions and Wrap Up​

  • What questions do you have for me?
  • Describe next steps in the process.