Asana Staff Level Fulltime Software Engineer Onsite Interview Experience

I found a lot of helpful posts on the forum when I was preparing for the interview, so I'm posting this to give feedback. I haven't received the results yet. I applied for a Team Leader (TL) position,

I found a lot of helpful posts on the forum when I was preparing for the interview, so I'm posting this to give feedback. I haven't received the results yet. I applied for a Team Leader (TL) position, probably at the staff level. The phone interview lasted 1 hour. 30 minutes were about handling tech debt, and 30 minutes were about implementing a simplified Twitter application using a Software Development Engineer (SD). These were mentioned on the forum. I felt my SD performance was just average, but I still

passed. The onsite interview consisted of 5 rounds: 2 hours of coding, which involved drawing rectangles. A post had a very specific question on this topic. After that, they asked follow-up questions, such as how to handle write-heavy tasks, read-heavy tasks, and how to implement redo and undo functions. The 75-minute Head Manager (HM) round discussed my experience, asking about my most impactful project, how I handled conflicts, and what I would do differently if I could do it again. The 60-minute project leadership round consisted of two questions: one about building a timeline (mentioned on the forum), and the other about migrating a RESTful API service. The questions were quite detailed, including how to allocate personnel, the steps involved, and the execution process. The 60-minute system design round didn't actually spend all the time on system design. He first asked an algorithm question—just a verbal answer, no need to run it—about an almost sorted array, which could be solved in Java using Partition Magic. I spoke for about 10 minutes. Then he asked about system design, specifically designing a system similar to Asana, but focusing on the online collaboration part. This part was similar to a chat system using WebSockets, and I needed to explain how to manage substitutions. Reading some chat system design documents was sufficient. The 60-minute design document review round was something I hadn't seen mentioned in other interview experiences. He first asked what I usually look at when reviewing a design document, then gave me a design document to read and comment on. The design document itself was about a system built on Git, and the idea was to send a notification to a PR that hadn't been reviewed for a long time. I felt my answers in this round were so-so; I initially misunderstood what the system was trying to do. Finally, some system issues were discussed, mainly that everything is synchronous processing; if one service crashes, the entire event is lost. Overall, the company atmosphere seemed good, and the interviewers were all nice. I don't know the results yet; I'll update you when I get them. It seems like this company is a bit niche? There's so little information about it on the forum. I'm a bit conflicted right now. Actually, I originally used it as practice, but the interview went well, and I heard the pay is good. Additional content (2025-09-26 23:50 +08:00): They emailed me saying they'd call me this afternoon, haha.