Success at SentiLink requires a balanced combination of deep technical expertise, strong communication skills, and a genuine curiosity about fraud prevention. Your interviewers will evaluate you across several key dimensions to ensure you can thrive in their fast-paced, high-impact environment.

Technical Competency – You must demonstrate a strong grasp of backend software engineering principles, data structures, and algorithms. This includes writing clean, idiomatic code in your preferred language during live coding sessions and showcasing a structured approach to system design.

Problem-Solving & Analytical Thinking – Interviewers want to see how you approach complex, ambiguous challenges. Whether you are designing a clustering engine or debugging a latency issue, you should break down the problem logically, state your assumptions clearly, and evaluate the trade-offs of different solutions.

Domain Interest & Product Empathy – While prior fraud experience is not strictly required, a keen interest in SentiLink's mission is essential. You should be prepared to discuss how your technical decisions impact end-users, partners, and the overall security of the platform.

Collaboration & Cultural Alignment – SentiLink places a high value on transparency, responsiveness, and mutual support. You will be evaluated on how well you take feedback, how you communicate technical concepts, and your ability to collaborate effectively with both engineering peers and founding leadership.

The interview process at SentiLink is highly structured, transparent, and designed to evaluate both your technical depth and your alignment with the company's culture. Candidates frequently highlight the professionalism and responsiveness of the recruiting team, noting that expectations and feedback are clearly communicated at every stage of the journey. The entire process typically spans three to six weeks, depending on candidate availability and scheduling.

The journey begins with a standard recruiter screen to align on your background, compensation expectations, and interest in the company. This is followed by a technical screening phase, which often includes a hiring manager interview and a technical assessment. This technical assessment may take the form of a take-home coding assignment or a proctored live coding session over Zoom. Once you pass this stage, you will move to a comprehensive virtual onsite panel that dives deep into your engineering capabilities, product intuition, and behavioral fit.

The visual timeline above outlines the typical progression from your initial contact to the final decision. Candidates should use this roadmap to pace their preparation, ensuring they dedicate sufficient time to technical practice before the coding stages and system design review before the onsite panel. While the exact ordering of rounds can occasionally vary by team, this structure represents the standard evaluation path for engineering roles.

To excel in the SentiLink interview process, you must understand the specific competencies evaluated in each core round. The company seeks well-rounded engineers who can write high-quality code, architect scalable systems, and think critically about the fraud domain.

Live Coding & Algorithmic Problem Solving

This area evaluates your ability to translate logical thinking into clean, functional, and optimized code. You will typically face live, proctored coding sessions or a hands-on coding exercise where you must solve algorithmic problems in a programming language of your choice.

Be ready to go over:

• Algorithmic efficiency – Understanding time and space complexity (Big O notation) and optimizing your solutions accordingly.
• Data structure selection – Choosing the right tools (e.g., hash maps, sets, trees, or graphs) to solve problems efficiently.
• Test case validation – Writing modular code that is easy to test, and proactively walking through edge cases such as null inputs, empty structures, or boundary values.

Example scenarios:

• Implementing a custom clustering algorithm to group related data points based on matching attributes.
• Parsing and validating complex, nested JSON payloads representing financial transaction histories.

System Design & Platform Architecture

This evaluation area focuses on your ability to design robust, distributed backend systems that can scale seamlessly. Interviewers want to see how you handle real-world constraints such as network latency, data consistency, and system availability.

Be ready to go over:

• API design – Creating intuitive, RESTful, or gRPC endpoints that are easy for external partners to integrate with.
• Scalability and performance – Utilizing caching, load balancing, and database indexing to handle high-throughput traffic.
• Data modeling – Deciding between SQL and NoSQL databases based on the relationships and access patterns of your data.
• Advanced concepts – Event-driven architectures, message queues (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ) for asynchronous processing, and distributed consensus.

Example scenarios:

• Designing a real-time risk assessment engine that processes API requests from banks within a 100ms SLA.
• Architecting a secure, distributed storage system for sensitive personally identifiable information (PII).

Fraud Specific & Product FIT

Often referred to as the "FIT" round, this unique interview assesses your product intuition and your interest in the fraud prevention domain. SentiLink wants to ensure that you are motivated by their specific mission and can think critically about how malicious actors exploit financial systems.

Be ready to go over:

• Fraud mechanics – Demonstrating an understanding of common identity fraud vectors, such as synthetic fraud or identity theft.
• Technical communication – Explaining complex technical issues or API errors clearly to non-technical stakeholders or partners.
• Product trade-offs – Balancing security friction (e.g., multi-factor authentication) with a seamless user onboarding experience.

Example scenarios:

• Reviewing a mock API documentation error and drafting a professional, empathetic email to a customer explaining how to resolve their integration issue.
• Proposing technical features to help detect coordinated networks of bad actors attempting to open fraudulent bank accounts.

Leadership & Executive Alignment

The final stages of the process involve conversations with engineering leadership and the founding team, which may include the Head of Engineering, CTO, and CEO. These interviews focus on your career trajectory, your leadership style, and your alignment with the company's long-term vision.

Be ready to go over:

• Ambiguity and ownership – Sharing examples of how you navigated poorly defined projects and successfully delivered them.
• Collaboration and mentorship – Discussing how you elevate those around you, handle conflicts, and contribute to a healthy engineering culture.
• Strategic alignment – Expressing a clear understanding of SentiLink's business model and how engineering drives company growth.

Example scenarios:

• Discussing a past technical project that failed, what you learned from the experience, and how you applied those lessons forward.
• Exchanging ideas with the CEO about the future of identity verification and the technical challenges of scaling the business.

As a Software Engineer at SentiLink, your day-to-day work will span across system architecture, feature development, and collaborative problem-solving. You will be responsible for:

• Designing and scaling backend systems – Writing clean, well-tested, and maintainable code to support high-throughput, low-latency APIs and internal data pipelines.
• Developing advanced fraud detection tools – Implementing sophisticated algorithms, including identity clustering and network analysis, to identify and mitigate synthetic identity fraud.
• Collaborating across teams – Partnering closely with data scientists, risk analysts, and product managers to translate complex fraud insights into robust engineering solutions.
• Maintaining platform reliability – Monitoring system performance, optimizing database queries, and participating in on-call rotations to ensure the continuous availability of critical services.
• Supporting customer integrations – Ensuring that external partners have a seamless experience when connecting to SentiLink's APIs by maintaining clear technical documentation and occasionally assisting with technical troubleshooting.

To be competitive for a Software Engineer position at SentiLink, you should possess a strong foundation in backend development and a track record of delivering high-quality software.

• Must-have skills – Strong proficiency in modern backend languages such as Python, Go, Java, or C++, with a deep understanding of object-oriented programming or functional programming paradigms.
• Must-have skills – Proven experience designing, building, and maintaining scalable distributed systems, microservices, and RESTful APIs.
• Must-have skills – Solid understanding of database systems, including relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL) and NoSQL solutions, along with experience optimizing complex queries.
• Nice-to-have skills – Prior experience working in the fintech, identity verification, cyber security, or fraud prevention industries.
• Nice-to-have skills – Familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS or GCP), containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and modern data processing frameworks.
• Soft skills – Exceptional communication skills, a high degree of empathy for customers, and a collaborative, low-ego approach to solving technical challenges alongside cross-functional partners.