Technical Interview Prep for your Karat Interview

We’re excited to move you forward to the next step of our hiring process: a 60-minute live
video interview conducted by our technical assessment partner, Karat. Be on the lookout for an
email with instructions on how to schedule your interview soon!

Karat is a deeply integrated partner who will conduct this portion of the Wayfair hiring process,
because they give you great scheduling flexibility (nights/weekends), and their interviewing
engineers are experts at delivering unbiased assessments that focus on technical skills. Our
engineers have worked closely with them to develop an interview format that's tightly aligned
to the skill set required for the role, so you can expect an engaging and relevant interview
experience.

To Prepare:
● You will need to be in-front of a computer that has a webcam and audio connection
using a headset or headphones. We recommend being in a quiet space and using your
own computer.
● You may choose any programming and relational database language to complete the
coding and SQL components of your interview.
● The Karat interviewer will present each coding question using Coderpad, so we
recommend familiarizing yourself with the environment ahead of time.

Outline of your 60 minute interview:

● Brief introduction between you and the interviewer.
● 10 minutes on a set of questions designed to test your backend engineering knowledge.
● 15 minutes spent on SQL challenges, up to two.
● 30 minutes spent on up to three programming challenges (you can pick the order).
○ You will primarily be judged on completion of the problem(s).
○ Focus on getting to fully-working solutions. The optimality of your solution is
factored in, but is secondary.
○ When deciding how optimal a solution is, we’ll focus on its Big-O time and space
complexity.
● There is an option to redo the interview if you would like to try again.

For each programming challenge, you will:

● Be presented with the problem and have an opportunity to ask clarifying questions.
● Be asked to describe an algorithm.
● Choose your language and code up your algorithm in the coding environment.
○ Examples: Lists, arrays, strings, stacks, queues, hash tables, sets.
● Fix any bugs or edge cases.
● Once your solution is fully working, you’ll be asked to describe your solution’s time and
space complexity. (Note that if your solution differs from the original algorithm you
described, that’s OK. We’ll ask you to explain the time and space complexity of
whatever your final solution was.)

For further preparation, we highly recommend practicing some programming and SQL exercises
on ​sites like ​Codewars​ and/or ​Hackerrank​. ​Finally, be sure to check out Karat’s Interview
Details page for tips and best practices ​here.