Duolingo Frontend Engineer interview experience

The work involved building a small crossword-style UI with specific requirements, which felt reasonable for a frontend engineering position.

A couple of days after I finished the take-home, I was invited to the Pittsburgh office for on-site interviews. The recruiter was incredibly helpful with logistics, even offering to organize apartment viewings. Onsite ended up being multiple whiteboarding sessions with engineers who weren’t focused on frontend, centered mostly around basic algorithm work.

One part was especially confusing: I was asked to sit with a Python developer to implement a small