How to be Successful Interviewing for Big Tech

I’ve interviewed engineers at small startups, at Facebook and Amazon, at my own startup liblab, and now at Postman. Each stop shaped how I think about hiring – and what I think we’ve been getting wrong.

The Evolution of the Engineering Interview

Early in my career, interviews were mostly conversational – informal, sometimes insightful, often inconsistent. At Amazon and Facebook, structure replaced gut feeling: coding rounds, system design, behavioral, culture fit, each with rubrics and scorecards. The rigor was a real improvement.

But the coding rounds were almost entirely LeetCode-style problems. Reverse a binary tree. Find the shortest path in a graph. Pseudocode was often enough to pass. You weren’t evaluated on whether you could ship working software – you were evaluated on whether you’d memorized the right algorithms. A test of preparation, not capability.

At liblab, I moved to take-home tasks so candidates could code on their own time, in their own environment, with their preferred tools. It gave us a much more realistic signal. But I kept iterating.

How We Do It at Postman

Now at Postman, leading the Codegen team, I’ve had the opportunity to design an interview process from scratch based on everything I’ve learned. The core philosophy is simple: the interview should mirror the job.

Every part of our process is built around three principles:

Real-World Relevance

Every task and question we ask is as close as possible to actual day-to-day work. No trick questions. No abstract puzzles. If someone is interviewing for a role on my team, I want them solving problems that look like the problems we solve every week. This does two things – it gives me a much stronger signal on how they’ll actually perform, and it gives the candidate a genuine preview of the work they’d be doing. If they don’t find the task interesting, that’s valuable information for both of us.

Modern Tools Are Welcome

Candidates can Google things. They can use Claude Code. They can bring their own laptop with their favorite IDE, extensions, and toolset. Anything that makes them productive in their real workflow is available to them during the interview.

Why? Because that’s how we work. I’m not interested in whether someone can recall syntax from memory or solve a problem with nothing but a whiteboard and a marker. I want to see how they think, how they leverage available resources, and how they build. If AI makes them faster and better, great – that’s a skill I want on my team.

Iteration and Collaboration Over Right/Wrong Answers

There are no gotcha moments in our interviews. If a candidate doesn’t know something, we don’t sit in silence and let them squirm. We explore it together. I want to be their coworker in that room, not their examiner. The best engineering work happens through collaboration, and I want to see how someone collaborates – not how they perform under artificial pressure.

The Interview Stages

1. Take-Home Task

This is where it starts. No pressure, no timer on a screen. Candidates complete the task on their own time, in their own environment, with whatever tools they want – including AI.

But here’s the key: the goal is not to submit a correct answer. The goal is to make deliberate choices and be ready to talk about them. What tradeoffs did you make? Why did you structure the code this way? What would you do differently with more time?

Once the solution is submitted, we pair up to review the code together. Our engineer walks through the submission and asks questions – “Why did you choose X over Y?” or “Can you explain how you architected this feature?” This stage is less about the code on the screen and more about the conversation around it. Can the candidate articulate their decisions? Do they understand the tradeoffs they made? Can they think critically about their own work? That’s what we’re looking for.

A few tips if you’re preparing for this stage:

• Don’t just submit – have an opinion. We’re not grading your code for correctness. We want to hear why you built it the way you did. If you made a shortcut, own it and explain what you’d do with more time.

• Use AI freely, but understand what it gave you. If Claude Code wrote half your solution, that’s totally fine. What’s not fine is being unable to explain how it works or why you accepted its suggestions. The pairing session will surface this quickly.

• Think out loud during the review. This isn’t a defense – it’s a conversation. Walk us through your reasoning, flag things you’re unsure about, ask us questions back. That’s exactly what working together looks like.

• Tradeoffs matter more than polish. A scrappy solution with clear, intentional tradeoffs tells us more than a polished one where you can’t explain the architecture. Show us how you think, not just what you built.

2. System Design

This is the stage where we calibrate on level. We’re looking for the ability to go both wide and deep – to zoom out and reason about architecture at a high level, and to zoom in and get into the details when it matters.

The more senior the candidate, the more we expect them to lead the conversation. A senior engineer should be driving the discussion, asking clarifying questions, identifying constraints, and navigating between breadth and depth on their own. A more junior candidate might need more guidance, and that’s perfectly fine – we’re evaluating them against different expectations.

Tips for this stage:

• Start wide, then go deep. Don’t dive into database schema in the first minute. Lay out the high-level components, talk through the major decisions, and then drill into the areas you’re most confident in. Showing you can navigate both altitudes is the whole point.

• Ask clarifying questions early. There’s no fully defined spec – that’s intentional. The candidates who impress us most are the ones who ask smart questions before jumping into a solution. It shows you know how to scope a problem, which is half the job.

• Say what you don’t know. If you’re fuzzy on a particular area, say so and explain how you’d go about figuring it out. That’s far more impressive than bluffing through it. We can tell the difference.

• Drive the conversation if you’re senior. If you’re interviewing at a senior or staff level, we expect you to lead. Treat the interviewer like a stakeholder – present options, explain tradeoffs, make recommendations. Don’t wait to be asked what’s next.

• Talk tradeoffs, not “right answers.” There’s no single correct architecture. What we want to hear is why you’d pick one approach over another – what you’re optimizing for, what you’re giving up, and when you’d revisit that decision. Every design choice is a tradeoff, and the best candidates make that explicit.

3. Behavioral

This is where we look for culture alignment – and I want to be clear, this isn’t about checking boxes or looking for rehearsed answers. We want to understand what excites the candidate. Do they care about the domain we work in? What motivates them? What do they love doing? What do they genuinely dislike?

There’s no right or wrong here. There’s only fit or not fit for our team, and that’s a two-way street. We want to make sure we’re the right place for what the candidate is looking for just as much as we want to make sure they’re right for us. If someone is going to be unhappy doing the kind of work we do, the interview is the right time to figure that out – for everyone’s sake.

Tips for this stage:

• Just be you. Seriously. Don’t try to reverse-engineer what we want to hear. If you’re excited about something, let that come through. If you hate a certain type of work, say so. We’d rather find out now than three months in.

• Treat it as your interview too. Ask us the hard questions. What’s frustrating about the role? What does a bad day look like? If we’re not the right fit for what you want, this is your chance to figure that out – and we respect candidates who are that deliberate about their career.

• Be specific. “I like building things” doesn’t tell us much. Tell us about a time you were genuinely energized by a problem, or a project where you lost track of time. The details are what make the conversation real.

TL;DR

I believe the interview should be the beginning of a working relationship. If someone walks out of our process – whether they get the offer or not – they should feel like they had a fair shot, learned something about how we work, and actually enjoyed the experience.

We’re building something exciting at Postman, and we want to find great engineers who will thrive here. The best way to do that is to show you what working with us actually looks like – no tricks, no gotchas, just real work with real people.

If this resonates with you, we’re hiring and we’d love to hear from you. Come build with us – check out our open roles at Postman Careers or reach out to me directly on LinkedIn.