I had two interviews one after the other. The first was a values fit interview with a Staff Engineer covering behavioral questions: projects I'm most proud of, how I align with Intercom's values, and how I handle ambiguity and ownership. The second was a coding challenge where I had to solve a problem involving agent assignment and task management. Think data structures, queues, and designing a system under time constraints. Intercom provided preparation material upfront a detailed interview guide covering exactly what to expect, the values they measure, and engineering level expectations.

My experience seems similar to what many others have shared here. I was ghosted for two weeks after my interview, which led me to check Glassdoor reviews about their interview process. Unfortunately, the reviews were very telling. Given the size of the company, I expected a more structured and professional process, not something that felt this disorganized. The interview started with their usual coding question, which I completed fairly quickly. The interviewer then asked me to extend the solution by adding more complexity, which I was able to do. He also asked about the time and space complexity, which I answered. After that, there was another extension to the problem, which I completed as well. Once the interviewer seemed to run out of extensions, he started asking questions about my solution and how it could be improved. I explained my approach and suggested improvements. He then said he had one final question, which I answered. After that, he said, “Sorry, I still have one more question,” even though we only had about five minutes left. Now this question was to optimize my solution, so I told him how I would do it but using the first principles and I didn't use the software engineering term for this solution, so he didn't seem very satisfied so he was me why not use a priority queue, in my mind I thought I did describe him exactly this, but it has been quite some time I hadn't worked with it first hand, so I told him I don't exactly remember how that works. He said it was fine and not to worry, then asked if I had any questions. We ended the interview shortly after. After that, there was a long silence. I followed up multiple times, but the interview scheduler did not respond. Eventually, after a long delay, I received the standard rejection email. When I asked for feedback, I was told that I could not answer the last question, so the interviewer could not ask followup questions, even though he had presented it as the final question and there were only a few minutes left. Overall, the process felt poorly managed and inconsistent. It is disappointing to see a company of this size run interviews this way.