Interview Prep

This page collects interview preparation notes, story frameworks, and question strategies to use across active applications. See Job Search Overview for the full pipeline at a glance, and individual company pages — Stargate AI and Northwind — for role-specific prep. [Job Search Notes.md]

• Review Stargate AI's public API docs before the onsite [Job Search Notes.md]
• Prepare a story about owning a feature end to end (key signal for Stargate AI) [Job Search Notes.md]
• Send Dana availability for the following week after the onsite [Job Search Notes.md]

The Stargate AI team explicitly values people who ship end to end and talk to users. [Job Search Notes.md] Structure your story using the following arc:

• Situation: What was the user problem or business need?
• Ownership: What did you personally drive, across which layers (frontend, backend, infra)?
• User contact: How did you talk to users — did you run discovery, read feedback, do usability testing?
• Result: What shipped, and what was the measured impact?

Stargate AI — Senior Product Engineer

• Small team (~20), early-stage — demonstrate product mindset and autonomy [Job Search Notes.md]
• Full-stack: React + Python — be ready to go deep on both [Job Search Notes.md]
• System design round: think at scale but also about pragmatic early-team trade-offs
• Product sense round: show user empathy and shipping instinct [Job Search Notes.md]

Northwind — Frontend Engineer

• Design-systems heavy: Figma-to-code, strong CSS — prepare concrete examples of component/token work [Job Search Notes.md]
• Larger company (~300): expect process questions; speak to collaboration with designers [Job Search Notes.md]
• Reflect on trade-off: role may offer less product ownership — be prepared to discuss what you want [Job Search Notes.md]

• Lead with impact and ownership, not just task completion
• Reference user conversations whenever possible — shows product-minded engineering [Job Search Notes.md]
• For system design: clarify requirements, state trade-offs explicitly, and tie decisions back to the business context (SMB AI infra for Stargate AI) [Job Search Notes.md]

*Source: Job Search Notes.md*