Preparing for an interview at RealSelf requires a balanced approach that covers both technical proficiency and soft skills. Interviewers place a heavy emphasis on how you think and collaborate, rather than just your ability to memorize standard algorithmic patterns.

Technical Pragmatism – You must demonstrate that you can write clean, readable, and maintainable code. RealSelf values engineers who write comprehensive comments and care about the long-term maintainability of their code over those who focus solely on clever, hyper-optimized micro-performance.

Problem-Solving and Communication – During technical sessions, talk through your thought process out loud. Your interviewers want to understand how you break down complex, ambiguous problems and how you evaluate different trade-offs under pressure.

Legacy Code Adaptability – Be ready to discuss how you navigate, debug, and improve older codebases. Much of the engineering work involves modernizing existing systems, so showing excitement and capability in this area is a significant differentiator.

Culture and Empathy – RealSelf is a highly collaborative environment that values user empathy, transparency, and mutual respect. You should prepare to discuss how your past work has positively impacted users and how you foster healthy working relationships within engineering and product teams.

The interview process at RealSelf is designed to be thorough, transparent, and highly collaborative. It typically takes between four to six weeks to complete, depending on scheduling and holidays. Throughout the process, the hiring team focuses heavily on evaluating your real-world engineering skills rather than abstract academic puzzles.

The journey begins with an initial HR screen to discuss your background, career goals, and interest in the company. This is followed by a take-home technical assessment or a solo coding challenge, which usually involves a mix of coding and database queries. Once you pass this stage, you will move on to live video interviews where you will walk through your solution and tackle real-time coding problems with senior engineers. The final stage is an intensive interview loop where you will meet with engineering leaders, product managers, and potential teammates.

The timeline above outlines the typical progression from your first contact to the final decision. You should use this visualization to pace your preparation, ensuring you allocate enough time to practice both live coding and system design before reaching the final loop. While the process is rigorous, it is structured to give you a realistic preview of the day-to-day work environment at RealSelf.

Practical Coding and Take-Home Execution

This evaluation area focuses on your ability to solve real-world coding problems independently and collaboratively. RealSelf prefers practical engineering challenges, such as text manipulation, data parsing, and basic scripting, over highly abstract algorithmic puzzles.

Be ready to go over:

• Clean code principles – Writing readable, well-structured code with sensible variable naming and modular design.
• Code documentation – Utilizing clear, concise comments to explain your logic and any trade-offs you made.
• Language proficiency – Demonstrating a strong command of your chosen language, typically Python, JavaScript, or Ruby.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Optimizing time and space complexity for high-throughput text processing pipelines.

Example scenarios:

• Completing a take-home assignment that requires parsing a text file and formatting it into a clean, justified layout.
• Walkthrough of your take-home code with an engineer, explaining why you chose specific data structures.
• Live-coding a solution to filter and search a mock database payload in a collaborative video session.

Database Design and SQL

Because RealSelf manages a massive amount of user-generated content, reviews, and doctor profiles, strong database skills are highly valued. You will be evaluated on your ability to structure data and write efficient queries.

Be ready to go over:

• Relational database design – Structuring tables, defining relationships, and ensuring data integrity.
• Query optimization – Writing efficient SQL queries using joins, aggregations, and subqueries.
• Data modeling – Designing schemas that can scale as the application grows and features evolve.

Example scenarios:

• Writing a complex SQL query to find the most active doctors in a specific geographic region based on user reviews.
• Explaining how you would index a database table to speed up search queries on a high-traffic page.
• Discussing the trade-offs between SQL and NoSQL databases for storing unstructured user feedback.

Behavioral and Culture Fit

At RealSelf, how you work is just as important as what you build. The team places a high priority on cultural alignment, emotional intelligence, and cross-functional communication.

Be ready to go over:

• STAR methodology – Structuring your behavioral answers by explaining the Situation, Task, Action, and Result.
• Conflict resolution – Navigating healthy disagreements with teammates, product managers, or stakeholders.
• Empathy for users – Demonstrating a deep understanding of the customer's needs and how your technical decisions affect them.

Example scenarios:

• Answering questions about a time you had to deliver a project under a tight deadline with incomplete requirements.
• Discussing how you mentored a junior engineer or helped onboard a new team member.
• Explaining how you handled a production outage or a critical bug that impacted end users.