At Lyric, a Software Engineer is responsible for designing, building, and scaling the core technology products and platforms that power our tech-driven real estate and hospitality operations. The engineering team is tasked with solving complex logistical, transactional, and operational challenges, translating real-world physical constraints into elegant software solutions. Whether you are working on the booking engines, inventory management systems, or the Replay platform, your work directly impacts our ability to deliver seamless, high-quality experiences to customers and partners alike.

The engineering culture at Lyric emphasizes practical problem-solving and systemic thinking over rigid specialization. Because our systems interface with real-world operations, engineers must build highly reliable, scalable, and adaptable software. You will collaborate closely with cross-functional partners in Solution Engineering, Sales, and Operations to ensure our technical strategy aligns with business growth. This role offers the unique opportunity to work on large-scale distributed systems, complex optimization models, and legacy modernization efforts in a fast-paced environment.

To succeed as a Software Engineer here, you must possess strong software engineering fundamentals, a generalist mindset, and the ability to navigate ambiguity. The team values clean code, robust architecture, and first-principles thinking. If you enjoy tackling non-traditional problems that bridge the gap between physical operations and digital infrastructure, you will find this role both challenging and deeply rewarding.

The questions you will encounter during the Lyric hiring process are designed to evaluate your practical coding skills, architectural design capabilities, and behavioral alignment with our team culture. Rather than testing memorized algorithms, our interviewers focus on how you analyze problems, structure code, and collaborate with others.

Live Coding & Algorithmic Problem-Solving

These questions assess your ability to write clean, maintainable, and efficient code under time constraints. Expect unique, non-traditional programming challenges rather than standard textbook questions.

• Implement a custom scheduling algorithm that optimizes booking distributions across a dynamic set of properties.
• Design and write a program to parse, validate, and process high-volume transactional data from external partner APIs.

Preparing for an interview at Lyric requires a balanced approach that covers technical depth, system-level design, and collaborative communication. You should focus on demonstrating how you think through problems from first principles rather than relying on rote memorization.

When preparing, focus on mastering the following core evaluation criteria:

Generalist Engineering Fundamentals – You must demonstrate a strong grasp of data structures, algorithms, and system design principles. Lyric values generalist engineers who can adapt to different parts of the tech stack and pick up new technologies quickly.

First-Principles Problem Solving – During live coding sessions, focus on explaining your thought process out loud. Interviewers care more about how you decompose a complex, ambiguous problem and design a clean solution than whether you write syntactically perfect code on the first try.

Cross-Functional Collaboration – You will interact with team members across engineering, sales, and executive leadership. You must show that you can translate complex technical concepts into clear, actionable business insights and work effectively with diverse stakeholders.

Systemic Design & Scalability – Be ready to build robust, fault-tolerant architectures. You should be comfortable discussing distributed systems, database design, API contract development, and how to handle high concurrency.

The interview process at Lyric is designed to be swift, rigorous, and highly interactive. From your initial application to the final decision, the process typically moves quickly, often concluding in less than three weeks. The company aims to provide a candidate-centric experience, ensuring you have a clear understanding of the team and the role at every stage.

The journey begins with a recruiter screen, followed by a technical phone screen containing a unique, live coding challenge. If you pass this stage, you will move to the onsite interview loop. The onsite is comprehensive and demanding, consisting of a challenging live programming session, system design discussions, and multiple 1-on-1 conversations with engineering peer groups, cross-functional partners, and executive leadership, including the CEO.

The timeline above illustrates the standard progression of stages a candidate will navigate during the Lyric hiring process. While the exact flow may vary slightly depending on the seniority of the position and the specific team, most candidates can expect to move from the initial recruiter call to the final executive round in a structured, sequential manner. Use this timeline to pace your preparation, focusing first on core coding skills before shifting your attention to system design and behavioral alignment.

To excel in the Lyric interview process, you must understand exactly how you will be evaluated across key technical and behavioral competencies.

Live Programming & Logical Execution

This stage is designed to assess your hands-on coding ability, logical reasoning, and approach to problem-solving. Unlike standard algorithmic puzzles, the programming challenges at Lyric are highly practical and representative of real-world software engineering tasks.

Be ready to go over:

• First-principles implementation – Writing clean code without relying heavily on specialized external libraries.
• Code readability and structure – Organizing your code logically with clear variable naming, helper functions, and appropriate comments.
• Edge-case handling – Identifying and gracefully handling null inputs, boundary conditions, and unexpected data formats.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Concurrency management, memory efficiency, and custom data structure implementation.

Example scenarios:

• "Implement a thread-safe cache with a custom eviction policy from scratch."
• "Write a parser that processes a stream of nested operational logs and extracts specific performance metrics."
• "Optimize a resource-allocation script to reduce its execution time from quadratic to linear complexity."

System Design & Scalability

At Lyric, our systems must handle complex operational data, high-concurrency transactions, and real-time integrations. Interviewers will evaluate your ability to design scalable, reliable, and maintainable software architectures.

Be ready to go over:

• API design and contracts – Creating clean, RESTful, or gRPC-based APIs that are easy for internal and external developers to consume.
• Database modeling – Choosing between SQL and NoSQL databases based on consistency, availability, and partition tolerance requirements.
• Distributed systems patterns – Implementing message queues, caching layers, and load balancers to handle high traffic.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Event sourcing, CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation), and zero-downtime database migrations.

Example scenarios:

• "Design a real-time notification system that alerts operations staff when a booking status changes."
• "Architect a scalable data warehouse integration to support our solution engineering and sales analytics teams."
• "Design a fault-tolerant system to process and reconcile daily financial transactions with external partners."

Behavioral & Cross-Functional Alignment

Because engineering at Lyric is deeply integrated with the broader business, we look for engineers who are excellent communicators, collaborative teammates, and proactive problem solvers.

Be ready to go over:

• Handling ambiguity – How you navigate vague requirements and deliver value in a fast-paced environment.
• Conflict resolution – Your approach to resolving technical disagreements within your team or with external stakeholders.
• Continuous learning – How you keep your skills sharp and how you help mentor and level up those around you.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Managing up, influencing without authority, and driving organizational alignment on technical debt.

Example scenarios:

• "Describe a time you had to deliver a critical feature with incomplete requirements. How did you proceed?"
• "How do you handle feedback from a peer review that is highly critical of your architectural approach?"
• "Tell me about a time you identified a major systemic issue in your team's workflow and took the initiative to fix it."