Cruise Backend Engineer interview experience

The early stages were simple and fast: a short 15-minute HR call followed by a phone screen where the interview started with a brief introduction to the team, then a run through of my projects, and finally a coding portion. The coding segment was scheduled as about 50 minutes, which made it feel like the screen was genuinely assessing technical ability rather than staying purely conversational.

The tone throughout the phone interactions was pretty light, and the whole sequence felt easy to manage because the steps were clear and time-boxed. There wasn’t any sense that I was being strung