Postman | Senior Engineer | April 2025 | Reject

The entire process went for over a month. I was contacted by someone from staffing agency who forwarded my profile to Postman. Got a call back from Postman recruiter after almost 3 weeks.

Round 1: HM Discussion Had a 1 hour discussion with the HM. It included questions about my experience, the projects that I had worked on, some scenario based questions and some high level design questions based on caching.

Got confirmation after 3 days that the feedback is positive and they scheduled the next two rounds - machine coding and system design. I asked to schedule design first.

Round 2: System Design I was asked to design a system similar to Google Calendar with focus on async flows. Panelist also focused on API design etc. It went well.

Round 3: Machine Coding This was scheduled after another 1.5 week or so. I was expected to have a local setup along with database and the expectation defined by the recruiter was that I will be expected to write working API code with DB integrations. However, the panelist was very cool and we had a good discussion around building Facebook like comment system with in-memory store. Initially he wanted me to start on Google Doc itself, after almost 40 mins he gave me a choice to switch to IDE if I wanted, which wouldn't have been wise for me since more than half the code was in Google Doc, so I continued there. He extended the discussion by around 25 mins but had a good discussion.

Got a call from recruiter after a week that the feedback is positive in all the rounds just not very strong in design. She mentioned it is strong but not very strong and since I had experience in building platforms too, they wanted to schedule another HM screening to identify the right team. This got scheduled in the next week, which became the game changer.

Round 4: Yet another HM (or may be bar raiser) It was with one of their Senior EM who was hired in Postman a month ago.I checked his LinkedIn profile before the interview and he held total 5 years of experience. The HM from my first round reported to him who held over 11 years of experience (imagine!). This guy made his assumption that I do not have product building experience because according to him, he is the only one building product in the world as it is being used by Millions of users across the globe. Haha. After almost 50 mins of this kind of conversation, he asked me to build dating app and asked me if I had used one. I was pissed with his attitude and asked him to share his experience using it. Anyways, I started with designing the system, defining core components like location services etc but he apparently read the first article in google search and wanted me to just put ES in the design and was not even following what I was saying. Dragged this discussion for almost 2 hours. I called up the recruiter after 3 days when I did not hear back and told her my experience. Received a call back from the recruiter after 2 weeks that this HM mentioned I do not have product exp. When I highlighted his limited exp in the industry, they mentioned he was hired directly by the founders from US and since he is the SEM, they can't do anything, lol.

Would have anyways got difficult for me to work with manager like him. I have worked in different companies, different departments and at least with 8 managers, have lead teams of over 15 people - of course I understand these red flags.

Overall experience was good except for the last round, the recruiter was also responsive and honest. So overall I was satisfied but I rather take this rejection as mutual, bcz I also get to choose my manager haha.

Hope this helps someone and all the best if you end of getting under this manager.