Alex Roitman
Remote (located in New Hampshire)
Back-end / infra
rshura@gmail.com
Brief description
Alex has a long history of senior roles at startups, mostly owning performance-intensive or high-scale distributed computing, mostly with series A-B companies. Most of his work has been with data and analytics-adjacent companies, including his last job with Arrow-friendly compute startup Voltron Data and his last-but-one role with real estate startup HouseCanary.
His performance on our interview was a very typical senior back-end pass: strongest on architecture and opinionated on details, a little weaker on timed coding and algos.
What they're looking for
Alex is looking roles that have challenging problems that benefit from well-thought-out solutions. That’s why he likes startups: he feels the low structure, high-ownership environment means he can deliver results that matter, rather than feeling like he’s building for someone else. He'd like a company around series A stage, where the hierarchy isn't too dense but where every engineer isn't doing devops individually.
Interview results
If you're new to our interview, here's what you need to know:
It's a 90 minute call with one of our senior engineers. (Here's what's on it.)
Green scores = up to the bar of early-stage silicon valley startups (this is a high bar).
Any green score is a recommendation for that area.
A "good" score is approximately 90th percentile.
A "great" score is approximately 95th percentile.
An "exceptional" score (extremely rare) is approximately 99th+ percentile.
Remember that if someone appears here at all, we recommend them.
Overall:
Good
Section scores:
Timed coding
Not quite
Not bad, just on the slower side than what we’d like. He got a bit ahead of himself planning for later steps, and feels (perhaps correctly) that he’d have picked up speed later as a result.
Concepts - CS/Algos
Not quite
Not a strength, which is typical for people of his level of seniority, but he had at least something to show here.
...Full-stack web
Good
Excellent on our DBs question, good on the other two. A tad weaker on security, but still OK.
...Low-level & security
Good
Close to the line, but above our passing bar. Strongest on implementation details, a little weaker on security.
Architecture
Great
His strongest section. Our only caveat here is that he slightly overengineered the low-scale version of the problem, but that can be the result of optimizing for the wrong thing in an interview context. What he described was nevertheless correct, clear, and informed for both the low and high-scale versions of the problem.
Technical communication
Great
A notable strength, and he knows what he knows and what he doesn’t and doesn’t try to push past those boundaries.
