My Interview experience at GitLab
Hey everyone! 👋
In December 2020, I interviewed with GitLab Inc. for the position of Backend Engineer (Intermediate) with the Growth: Product Intelligence team.
This blog is all about the interview experience that I had with GitLab.
If I had to use one word for the experience, it would be `AWESOME`.
To be honest, I am not doing any justice to the incomparable experience I had by just using one word 😄. So, let's talk about it in detail. Shall we? Sure!
I have broken down the interview sections with the timeline and the amazing people with who I have interviewed with. I have their permission to mention and link their Twitter/LinkedIn profiles. So let’s get started!
Nov 30, 2020:
I had my first screening call with the lead recruiter, Cyndi Walsh. We discussed my motivation to interview with GitLab. Cyndi mentioned the company values, team information about what the team does, what is the team looking for, the process further in the interviews, etc. We also talked about my past and current contributions since the start of 2020 😄. It was a call for 30 mins or so and we wrapped up with the next steps if my application moves forward.
And as it goes, I got an email about the technical interview! 🎉
Dec 8, 2020:
I got an email just after the screening call, that, I am being moved to the technical interview round. To know about the technical interview round, you can check the GitLab handbook page on it.
Nicolas Dular from the Growth team was scheduled to take this round. As defined in the handbook page, he sent me an MR which I was asked to review and add my suggestions to improve it on.
This round lasts for 90 minutes in total, where the interviewer and you, will be going through the reviews you made, and fix the pipeline failures on the zoom call.
Nicolas is a great guy! We talked about general stuff before starting in, then worked along and collaborated on the interview merge request. Then we ended with me asking some questions about GitLab’s infrastructure on staging, canary, and production environments.
Nicolas helped me lower my nervousness in this round 😅 so, all in all, 90 mins were perfectly enough for me, we had a lot of conversation in those 90 mins about general stuff, the interview, and final closing questions.
I completed my interview at 4:30 PM IST, I got the request for the next round at 7 PM the same day! 🎉
Dec 11th, 2020:
The next round was the behavioral round. The panel for this round were 2 engineering managers and Nicolas was shadowing this round.
Jerome Ng, who is also my hiring manager, and Lindsay Kerr, who is a Frontend Engineering Manager at GitLab were the panel for the behavioral round.
This round revolves around the candidate’s alignment to the company values, STAR type questions and this is the best chance for the candidate to ask any questions related to the role, the responsibilities, the company, the values, etc.
One tip for this round is to prepare all the questions that you have, write them down as you research the company and the role. This saves time during the interview that otherwise might have spent in thinking if you had any questions.
This round was on Dec 11th, 10:30 PM IST to 11:30 PM IST.
And 2 hours later, around 1 AM IST, I got the email requesting availability for the next round! 🎉 🎊
Dec 16th, 2020:
The Director interview round.
After the availability email, I submitted multiple time slots for this round.
And it was scheduled for Dec 16th. This round was with Wayne Haber, Director of Engineering of Threat Management and Growth Department.
My team comes under the Growth Department. So, Wayne leads it and hence the round was scheduled with him.
This is somewhat similar to the earlier behavioral round, but as a candidate, you get a chance to ask questions about the company, the values from a DOE’s perspective. And I followed a similar process to prepare for this round too, once I got the scheduling confirmation, I wrote down my questions in a book where I wanted a DOE’s perspective from a leadership point of view.
This round was scheduled from 6:15 PM IST to 7:15 PM IST.
After this was done, around, 8:00 PM IST, 45 mins later, I got another email requesting references for the Reference Check process 🎉. This is the next step in the interview process.
Holidays:
After the last round, every one of us had holidays for Christmas and the new year!
Many people in the company were on leave, but Cyndi kept me updated about the interview stages every time.
Shoutouts:
Special shoutout to Cyndi Walsh, she truly lives the company values! The entire process was so transparent to me. I was told about everything, what stage I am in, where is the process pending so far, the compensation ranges for the roles, everything! She replied to my every email within minutes, after me sending it. This was my first of its kind experience where a recruiter replied so fast! 😅 Never experienced it before, folks.
Nicolas, Jerome, Lindsay, and Wayne were amazing! They made sure I was not getting nervous anytime during the interview and I am at my natural level while answering questions.
So, this was my amazing experience with GitLab!
And guess what, I made it! I got the offer, and I am starting on Feb 15th, 2021. It is a great start for the new decade for me.
Onwards and Upwards! 🚀 🚀
I wrote about my journey, the 1-year journey to get a job at GitLab, in a separate blog post.
That’s all for this post, folks. I have mentioned Twitter/LinkedIn for the amazing team who interviewed me, make sure you follow/connect with them.
Cheers! Peace ☮️
