I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at X (Seattle, WA) in Feb 2020
Interview
A phone screen, followed by the option of a take home test or a technical interview. Then a group meet and interview panel. The hiring manager was friendly and accommodating however the HR reps were awful. They did not read emails or treat me as a person but instead sent canned emails asking for previously provided information in the email thread and ignoring any requests for additional information.
The interviewer for the technical interview was clearly not trained in interviewing. He was unable to articulate a question and when pushed on specifics deflected asking for a "solution". It was clear he had a specific answer in mind despite never giving a full problem statement.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Twitter uses a monorepo that has too many tests to be run on one machine. When the tests run the raw logs are sent to the Engineer. People have been complaining that it's too hard to know what's broken after the suite is run. How would you solve this?
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at X (Boulder, CO) in Nov 2019
Interview
Overall, really positive interview experience.
Had an initial call with the hiring manager, did a great job explaining the "why" of the project and team.
Technical phone interview on HackerRank, pretty typical coding exercise, medium to hard difficulty.
On-site interview had two more coding exercises, one was really challenging and the other was very simple, as well as a system design interview, and then lastly a leadership/behavioral interview. Throughout the interviews, everyone was very friendly and engaged, not combative like some other places I've interviewed. I also had lunch with a few folks not on the interview panel, food and conversation were both great.
Throughout the entire process, from the first call to the offer negotiation, my recruiters were exceptional. I felt valued, informed, and welcomed.
Suggestion: highly recommend reviewing Twitter's existing architecture in prep for the system design, lot of good videos and articles on the web that would through parts of it.
Only negative is that each team's interview process seems different, so YMMV, and my experience doesn't reflect the same as other people I know that have interviewed at Twitter.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at X (Boston, MA) in Sep 2019
Interview
1 hour phone screen to assess technical skills. 3 90 minute onsite rounds to assess coding + system design + behavioral abilities.
One thing I really liked about how Twitter does things is that they give you detailed feedback on how you do in each round. This definitely helped me in preparing after the phone screen. I was told I did well on all technical portions.
One thing I did not particularly enjoy (but I understand) was the amount of focus on behavioral questions/answers. Even after the onsite concluded, I had two more 30 minute sessions with hiring manager and recruiter to go through more behavioral questions. My guess is that there were a few questions I did not provide too satisfactory of an answer, and ultimately led to the decision on not getting the final offer. Definitely interesting news and a bit of a humble pill to swallow if I'm being honest, but it is what it is.
Team and project I was applying for seemed really interesting and if I had gotten the offer I would have chosen this place to work at. Perks and benefits pretty much the standard in Bay Area. Alas I did not get it :(
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Given a stream of logs, parse and count actions per time window.
Lots and lots of behavioral questions, make sure to brush up on your resume and past projects and be able to talk about every single thing on it (I mean EVERYTHING).