I recently interviewed with Roku for a Senior Engineering position with their Mobile Backend team. Here's my review of their interview process. To get the interview, I mailed a Roku Recruiter from my LinkedIn contacts list and he responded promptly with an initial discussion of the company, my experience and match for the open roles. This was soon followed by a technical phone screen with the hiring manager. The phone screen was an algorithm question followed by some design questions, discussion of my experience and more specifics about the team and the role. I got the results of the phone screen very soon and I was invited for an onsite at the beautiful Roku campus in Los Gatos. The onsite had 5 technical rounds and 1 non technical round with HR. The technical rounds were a mix of programming, debugging and system design questions. All the questions were very reasonable, clearly explained and nothing out of the order of what you will be expected to do as a Software Engineer. The focus was on sound coding, design principles and appropriate use of data structures rather than some tricky gotchas. The interviewers themselves were very courteous, knowledgeable and very patient about answering any questions I had of the team and the role. I heard about the results of the interview on the same evening as well - as the recruiter was very mindful about other deadlines I had. The recruiter also clearly outlined their offer details and gave me a lot of insight into the company culture, team expectations and so on. Overall from the initial contact to the final results, the process with Roku was outstanding. In terms of prompt communication, professionalism in treating their candidates and fairness in terms of compensation, Roku is a model that other companies in the valley should strive to emulate.

Recruiter reached out via linkedin. Had a really bad experience in the first technical round. You walk into an interview hoping for a fair conversation. What you get instead is someone on the other side trying to prove they are smarter, louder, or more important than you. They ask vague questions. They interrupt everytime. They make you feel small for not reading their mind. I really regret appearing for the interview at Roku as it was really disrespectful. I searched and found out that panel provide one to one interview prep and I think that’s why more than my actuall skills and knowledge he was interested in if I follow the same approach he teaches.