I went through a five-interview process that was a mix of coding, cultural-style discussion, project management conversation, and a system-design-focused round. The sequence started with two coding interviews, and I remember I failed the first coding challenge.
After that, the feedback themes were consistent: in the cultural interview and the project-manager conversation, I didn’t talk enough about complex projects I had contributed to before. When I reached the design-system interview, I realized I wasn’t as prepared as I needed to be, and my answers came out ambiguous—lacking the detailed architectural decisions they were looking for.
> 1 year
Difficult Negative Madrid
I started with a recruiter from Datadog’s New York office who walked me through what they were building, what they were looking for, and how the next steps worked. After that, I had a technical screening where I first talked for about 10 minutes about a project I had worked on, then solved two coding problems on CoderPad. The first was straightforward, while the second was a bit more challenging, and the interviewer stayed supportive with hints that made it feel collaborative rather than adversarial.
For the next stage, I chose between a take-home frontend project and a live React coding session, and I went with the take-home since I didn’t have as much professional React experience. I was told it would take 4–6 hours, but it ended up taking much longer when I tried to really showcase my work. After that, I did a system design interview on Excalidraw where I leaned into the frontend side as a kind of black box for the backend, focusing on UI design and the API endpoints they cared about. They kept asking follow-ups to explain my decisions and refine the approach.
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