Since coming to Europe, I started applying to various companies. In the process, I received over 200 rejection emails. Later, I began to lose hope in landing a job. After some time, however, larger companies (FAANG) started reaching out. This article focuses on my experience with IBM.
IBM has many vacancies for Entry-level positions, and the Cloud Platform Developer role caught my interest. I was drawn to the opportunity to work with Kubernetes, Terraform, and Cloud Computing, so I applied to gain experience in this area. Although my background in Infrastructure was limited, they reached out, and we began the interview process.
Panel Interview
Such panel interviews are rare in FAANG companies, but IBM uses this format. A few team members enter the interview at the same time and assess your knowledge, thinking process, and how you make decisions under stress (since they will try to put you under pressure).
I was asked questions related to IaC, K8S, Terraform, AWS/GCP, and programming skills. I was given real-world scenarios and asked how I would solve the problems. I answered the questions to the best of my ability.
Two days later, I heard back from the recruiter. The email began with a "Thank you...", which is typically a bad sign, but fortunately, this was not the case for me. They mentioned that the interview went very well and asked to schedule a final interview. I picked a date for the following week and began focusing on other tasks instead of preparing for the technical interview.
I can't share the exact questions as I signed an NDA regarding this.
Final Interview
The final round was primarily a hands-on interview. Unlike the typical Leetcode-style interview, this one was based on a real-world scenario.
You are given a prepared API, and you need to interact with it, retrieve data based on given conditions, filter the data, and return the result. There were so many conditions for filtering that I forgot some of them, and when I ran the code, I encountered errors. I started to panic.
The interviewer, a Senior from Bloomberg, conducted the interview in a calm and friendly manner. He made jokes to lighten the mood. I passed 98% of the tests, but 2% failed (I had missed an edge case). Afterward, the interview ended, and he told me he wanted to speak with me for a bit. He reassured me with a “Don’t worry, we’ll take you in” and we said goodbye.
The Result
At first, I thought the comment made in the final interview was just to comfort me. However, it turned out to be true. The team was based in the U.S., and they said it wouldn't be possible for me to work remotely from Poland.
My manager then asked me if I would be interested in applying for a Middle position in Build System Engineering, which had a great team. He mentioned it would only require one more interview, so I agreed.
I passed the final interview as well. The recruiter asked for my documents and assured me that they would send me an offer soon.
Conclusion
I spent a lot of time thinking before writing this post. I know that receiving an offer from a company is exciting news. In the past, I thought writing a post like "I got an offer from XYZ" might sound boastful, and I didn’t want to come across as showing off.
However, after receiving many requests (even from my father), I decided to share my experience, the process, my preparation, and some other interesting topics. In my next post, I’ll talk about how I received an offer from Dropbox.