A Software Engineer at Hover plays a critical role in developing and scaling the technology that transforms standard smartphone photos into highly accurate, interactive 3D property models. This position sits at the intersection of computer vision, spatial data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure, making it a highly technical and impactful role. The engineering team is responsible for building robust systems that process massive amounts of geometric and visual data, ensuring low-latency rendering and delivering seamless user workflows across web and mobile platforms.

By working on Hover's core platform, you will directly impact how contractors, insurance adjusters, and homeowners visualize, estimate, and reconstruct physical spaces. The challenges you will solve are complex and require a deep understanding of data modeling, system scalability, and front-to-back integration. Engineers here do not work in silos; they collaborate closely with product managers and designers to translate sophisticated spatial algorithms into intuitive, consumer-grade software products.

This role is ideal for engineers who thrive on solving ambiguous technical challenges and want to see the direct physical impact of their code. Whether you are optimizing a React-based frontend, designing a high-throughput backend service, or modeling complex spatial data relationships, your work will be central to Hover's mission of digitizing the physical world.

To succeed in the Hover interview process, you must be prepared for a mix of practical coding challenges, system design discussions, and collaborative behavioral assessments. The questions are designed to evaluate how you think, code, and collaborate under real-world conditions rather than testing your ability to memorize textbook algorithms.

Coding and Algorithm Challenges

These questions assess your core programming skills, code cleanliness, and ability to pair-program with other engineers.

• Implement a React component that fetches a list of property records and allows the user to filter and sort them in real-time.
• Solve a medium-level algorithmic challenge involving array manipulation or graph traversal, focusing on optimal time and space complexity.

Preparing for an interview at Hover requires a deliberate approach that balances technical execution with communication. The engineering team values candidates who can write clean code while also articulating the "why" behind their architectural decisions.

Technical Execution and Code Quality – You must demonstrate proficiency in modern software development practices. Whether you are completing a React pairing exercise or a backend coding challenge, focus on writing modular, readable, and well-tested code. Interviewers look at your variable naming, error handling, and how you structure your logic.

Data Abstraction and Modeling – Hover's product relies heavily on spatial data and complex physical relationships. You will be evaluated on your ability to think abstractly about data. Be ready to explain how you structure schemas, manage state, and design APIs that can adapt to changing product requirements.

Cross-Functional Communication – Engineers at Hover work closely with Product and Design. Throughout your interviews, demonstrate that you understand how engineering decisions impact the user experience and business goals. Avoid overly insular technical explanations; instead, frame your solutions in terms of product value and user impact.

Value Alignment and Collaboration – The team values earnestness, transparency, and a growth mindset. During behavioral discussions, share honest reflections on your past projects, including failures and what you learned from them. Showing that you are receptive to feedback and eager to collaborate is just as important as your technical skill.

The interview process at Hover is comprehensive and designed to evaluate your skills across multiple dimensions, including coding, system design, presentation ability, and cultural alignment. The process typically takes several weeks and involves multiple stages, ensuring that both you and the team have ample opportunity to evaluate the fit.

You will start with a standard recruiter screen followed by a hiring manager discussion and an initial technical test. If you progress past these stages, you will be invited to a comprehensive virtual onsite panel. This panel is highly structured and includes a mix of coding exercises, a data abstraction whiteboard session, behavioral assessments, and a unique technical walkthrough presentation where you present a past project to a cross-functional panel.

The visual timeline above outlines the typical progression from your initial contact to the final decision. Candidates should use this timeline to structure their preparation, focusing first on core coding skills before moving on to presentation design and system architecture concepts. While the exact order of the onsite rounds may vary, the overall evaluation areas remain consistent across all engineering teams.

Coding and Pair Programming

The coding assessments at Hover are designed to simulate real-world development rather than academic puzzle-solving. You will work on practical challenges, often involving live pair programming with a senior engineer.

Be ready to go over:

• Component Design – Building reusable, stateful components using modern frameworks like React.
• State Management – Managing local and global application state efficiently without unnecessary re-renders.
• Asynchronous Operations – Handling API requests, loading states, and error boundaries gracefully.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Optimizing rendering performance for heavy visual assets or handling complex mathematical calculations in the browser.

Example scenarios:

• "Refactor an existing, tightly-coupled component into modular, testable units while adding a new filtering feature."
• "Implement a real-time search auto-complete input that debounces API requests and handles network failures."

Data Abstraction & Whiteboarding

This round focuses on how you conceptualize and model complex systems. Rather than writing code, you will use a virtual whiteboard to design schemas and map out data flows.

Be ready to go over:

• Entity-Relationship Modeling – Designing clean relational or non-relational schemas that represent complex business domains.
• API Contract Design – Creating intuitive, RESTful, or GraphQL API endpoints that support efficient frontend data fetching.
• Scalability and Latency – Identifying bottlenecks in data retrieval and suggesting caching or indexing strategies.

Example scenarios:

• "Design the data layer for a collaborative property estimation tool where multiple users can edit measurements simultaneously."
• "Model the relationship between 2D image coordinates and their corresponding 3D spatial data points."

The Technical Walkthrough Presentation

One of the most distinctive parts of the Hover interview process is the interactive technical presentation. You will prepare a slide deck showcasing a complex technical project you have worked on in the past and present it to a panel of engineers and product partners.

Be ready to go over:

• Architecture Overview – Explaining the high-level design of the system and why specific technologies were chosen.
• Technical Trade-offs – Discussing the alternative solutions you considered and why you ultimately rejected them.
• Retrospective Analysis – Reflecting on what worked well, what failed, and how you would improve the system today.

Example scenarios:

• "Present the migration of a legacy monolithic service to a microservices architecture, highlighting how you managed data consistency."
• "Walk through the design of a performance-critical frontend feature that required custom state synchronization."

Product & Cross-functional Collaboration

This round evaluates how you collaborate within the "three-tier" model of Product, Engineering, and Design. Hover values engineers who actively participate in product discovery and user empathy.

Be ready to go over:

• The Triad Workflow – How you collaborate with product managers and designers to refine ambiguous requirements.
• User Empathy – Translating technical limitations into user-facing trade-offs and proposing alternative solutions.
• Agile Delivery – How you break down large epics into small, deliverable milestones.

Example scenarios:

• "Describe a situation where a proposed design was technically unfeasible. How did you work with the designer to find a compromise?"
• "How do you handle a situation where product priorities change mid-sprint?"