Interview Guide
BACKEND SOFTWARE ENGINEER
At Fetch, we believe understanding our engineering culture and how it aligns with your values
plays a critical role in your success and satisfaction at work. We want to be clear and honest
about what we value at Fetch and the challenges you’ll face each day.
If you’re not excited by tackling tough problems and navigating ambiguity, Fetch may not be
the right fit for you. We don’t have everything figured out yet, and that means there are
countless opportunities for you to make a significant impact. Our challenges aren’t
trivial—we’re not just solving today’s problems, we are building solutions that will scale for
challenges we haven’t even discovered yet.
We move with urgency and take accountability seriously. At Fetch, every individual is entrusted
with responsibility and autonomy to help us achieve our goals. With that responsibility comes
the expectation that you’ll bring intensity and focus to everything you do. At the same time, we
believe in fostering a supportive and enjoyable engineering environment where collaboration,
camaraderie, and a sense of fun are essential parts of the experience.
You’ll be surrounded by a group of exceptionally motivated and driven people, all with diverse
life circumstances, values, and working styles. This environment can be demanding—if you
compare yourself to others, you may always find someone working harder, staying longer, or
achieving more. However, we are not a zero-sum culture: someone else’s success does not
come at your expense. We don’t have a “winner-takes-all” mentality. That said, we are highly
competitive in the sense that when you set a high bar, you’re likely to inspire those around you
to raise it even higher. Success often means growing by stepping outside your comfort zone.
If you’re excited by the unknown, drawn to difficult challenges, looking for a supportive and
talented engineering team, and eager for the success that comes from hard work, then let’s get
started. There’s still so much left to accomplish.
Process Overview
Stage 1: Take-Home Assessment (~2-3 hours)
We have created this take-home to allow you to demonstrate your technical skills and how you
approach a realistic technical challenge. The assessment is language and IDE agnostic, so show
us what you've got! We hope that you find the exercise fun and engaging so please feel free to
let your creativity come through. We do not believe that LeetCode-style technical interviews
are the best way to truly evaluate a candidate’s skill set and appreciate you taking the time to
work through this exercise.
Stage 2: Technical Interview (1 hour)
You’ll partner with a Fetch Engineer to go over your technical exercise, covering your
language/framework selection, problem-solving strategies, implementation choices, and
relevant past experience. Be ready to share your thought process, tackle specific challenges,
and write new code and design new features.
Stage 3: Recruiter Touch Point (20 minutes)
Connect with your Recruiter to learn more about the role and go over what to expect during
the virtual onsite.
Stage 4: Panel (Total duration: 5-6 hours including breaks)
The panel interview session is less about testing you on your technical skills and more about
determining whether we want to work with each other. It does provide an opportunity to
confirm your technical abilities align with what we observed during the phone screen, so we’ll
use challenges across various technical areas to observe how you work through problems. It’s
not necessarily about whether you solve the problem or get the right answer. We’re looking to
decide whether you will contribute in ways that move Fetch forward, increase our talent
density, and display curiosity and willingness to learn when you don’t know the answer right
away.
Hiring Manager Intro (30 minutes)
Coding (60 minutes)
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​This will be a technical programming challenge that you will be expected to walk
through and attempt to answer with a programming language and IDE/Editor of your
choosing. There will be a Fetch engineer to answer questions and who will want to hear
you explain your thoughts as you work.
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Data Modeling (60 minutes)
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This will be a more broad, semi-discussion at the application level, focusing on how you
build software. You’ll be using Excalidraw with an engineer who will want to hear your
thought process as you work through prompts. Please familiarize yourself with this tool.
Architecture (60 minutes)
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This will be a more broad, semi-discussion at the system level, focusing on how you
make software available to others. You’ll be using Excalidraw with an engineer who will
want to hear your thought process as you work through prompts. Please familiarize
yourself with this tool.
Non-Technical (30 minutes)
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This is an opportunity to learn more about Fetch, how we collaborate with other teams,
and what it takes to be successful here while also covering why you are excited about
Fetch and how you work with cross-functional partners.
Hiring Manager Wrap Up (30 minutes)
AI Statement
We are big fans of AI and the potential it unlocks for engineers, but kindly ask that you refrain
from using tools like ChatGPT, Copilot or similar tools during the interview or to generate your
solution to the take-home assessment. We expect you to be able to talk in detail about the
code you submit, so we want to see the solution come from you directly. These are great tools
for day to day velocity acceleration tasks (our engineers totally use them), but they can get in
the way of seeing how you truly think about breaking down new technical challenges we solve
every day at Fetch.
General Tips
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Ask Questions: Ensure you fully understand the problem from the start.
Plan Your Approach: Discuss your plan before diving into code or design.
Use Resources: Feel free to look anything up on Google, StackOverflow, or common
libraries.
Communicate: Share your thoughts and approach, especially if you are getting stuck.
We want to see how you work.
Use the STAR Method: STAR stands for situation, task, action and result. This method
will help you prepare a clear, concise response using real-world examples.
It's not easy to get this far in our interview process. It shows you've got game, so relax
and have some fun.
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