Engineering hiring at PostHog
Engineers make up around 60% of our team, and we are almost always hiring for Engineering roles. This page provides internal documentation on our engineering hiring process, including roles and best practices for interviewers. You can find all open roles at PostHog on our careers page, in case you want to refer someone.
What we are looking for in engineering hires
Beyond the specific skills listed in the job description, we generally look for:
- Experience with relevant technologies (Python or similar, React or similar, something to do with big data is a bonus)
- We don't care how many years of professional experience someone has, but depending on our current team structure we may be looking for more or less experienced people for a role - if that's the case, we will be explicit in the job spec.
- Has built something from scratch, ideally with minimal outside help
- They may have been the founder of a startup, or built an impressive side project. They may have also worked on a project at work where they were the only developer.
- Communication skills
- More so than other companies, all of our communication is written and public for the world to see. Good written communication is key.
- User-centric
- Our engineering team work very closely with our users - they do customer support, demos, and help with implementation. All potential engineers need to be excited by the prospect of getting to work directly with users.
Engineering hiring process
Hiring is a team effort, and we need everyone to contribute to make the best new hires. Talent Partners handle all scheduling throughout the interview process, and support both interviewers, candidates and hiring leads.
You can find more information regarding the hiring process in the handbook, or reach out to @talent-folks in Slack.
Culture screen
The culture screen is handled by the Talent team. Normally this is a 20-30 min call where they make an initial assessment for the candidate's fit for the job, culture, communication style, and sort all logistics.
Technical screen
The technical interview is an hour-long technical interview with one of our engineers. This might be architecture design or diving more into past technical experiences in more of a workshop style. No whiteboarding or brain teasers.
Sometimes when you get part of the way into a technical interview it becomes clear that the person is not a fit. Because rejecting candidates needs to be done in a specific way, please continue the interview as usual and do not reject on the call. It's okay to end the interview a bit early - interviews often don't take the entire time, and it's okay to give this caveat ahead of every technical interview.
You should use the technical exercise guide when evaluating candidates at this stage.
You may be shadowed by another PostHog team member – a shadow is someone who listens in, but doesn't participate. This is something we do regularly among technical interviewers, as a way of improving the hiring process. During high season, we may ask some of you to record these interviews for training purposes to help us onboard and train new interviewers faster. The candidate will, of course, have the chance to opt out by either letting their recruiter know in advance or letting you know at the start of the interview - you should always ask the candidate for their permission before recording and this will never affect the outcome of the interview - there are many reasons why someone may opt out from being recorded.
Culture & motivation chat
One of our co-founders or execs – Tim or James, depending on scheduling – will meet with the candidate for a short 15 min chat to dive deeper into culture and motivation.
Engineering SuperDay
The final stage of our interview process is the PostHog SuperDay. This is a paid full day of work, which we can flexibly arrange around the candidate's schedule.
For full-stack roles, the task involves building a small web service (both backend and frontend) over a full day. The task is designed to be too much work for one person to complete in a day, in order to get a sense of their ability to prioritize (and ship!).
Each engineering SuperDay will have a SuperDay buddy, this person will conduct the interview halfway through the day, will be available in Slack throughout the day to answer any questions, they will also be giving feedback on the SuperDay output.
An engineering SuperDay usually looks like this (there is a degree of flexibility due to time zone differences):
- An invitation to a personal Slack channel for the SuperDay, which we'll use throughout the day
- This will include:- the talent team, cofounders, exec, hiring lead, & the SuperDay buddy
- Time to focus on the task
- An interview with the SuperDay buddy
- A chat with James, Tim, or an exec, whoever they didn't meet with in the previous stage
- Wrapping up – at the end of the work day, they'll send us what they've built, along with a summary
Usually the Superday buddy will review the output, but they can ask other engineers for input when needed, and we'll get back to the candidate with our final decision ASAP (always within a few days).
Overall, candidates should spend at least 80% of their time and energy on the task and less than 20% on meeting people, as we base our decision on their output of the day. However, we encourage everyone to use the Slack channel as much as needed for any questions or problems.
How to become an interviewer at PostHog
As PostHog grows and our hiring goals get bigger and bigger, to achieve that we will need more people taking interviews and assessing people in those interviews. As we scale, it's important that we maintain a calibration across interviewers by onboarding each new interviewer to the interviewing process carefully.
If you wish to get involved in interviewing, you can request so by contacting the talent team using the @talent-folks handle in Slack in the #team-people-and-ops channel. Please note, that if you are in your first 90 days at PostHog, you should not be focussing on interviewing and focus on ramping up and onboarding successfully. Even shadowing interviews can be distracting, so consider even leaving these until after your first 90 days.
Once you have let the talent team know, you'll work closely with a Talent Partner to get you up to speed. This will involve them scheduling you to shadow at least two live technical screens with two of our most experienced interviewers. They will also share with you the relevant watching and reading materials that should be consumed before conducting your first interview. Your very first interview will be shadowed by one of our experienced interviewers and they will give you feedback, on both their assessment of the candidate interviewed and then how you did. Based on how this goes, either you can get another interview shadowed by another engineer for more feedback, or you can go out on your own.
Your first interview alone
Your first interview alone might feel daunting, and it should. So it is best to prepare as much as possible, read all the available materials on the candidate ahead of schedule. Prepare how you will manage your time based off the interviews you've shadowed and the feedback from our shadowed interview. Block out time at the end of the interview to ensure you have time to write up your notes and reflect on the candidate and provide the feedback. Eventually you will get into the habit of being able to rely on AI notetaker notes (or your own notes) to be able to come back to leave the feedback but on your first go, it's important to have all the information fresh and give yourself plenty of time to go through this process. You want to feel excited about a candidate once you've finished up with them, but amongst this is a new experience so it's important to give yourself the ability to feel excited and go into detail on how you rate them. You want to be able to feel beyond reasonable doubt that you are making the right decision.
You should try to have as extensive notes as possible, this is good hygiene for interviewers at later stages to dig into areas of uncertainty. Always make sure to make any flags or doubts you have very clear.
Your first 5-10 interviews
Once you have conducted your first 5-10 interviews you will want to reflect on how you are getting on. The best way to do this is to review how your candidates have got on. If you've rejected more than 6 or 7, then perhaps you might be being too harsh. You can ask other interviewers or a talent partner to assess your notes and see if they would have been more lenient. The technical screen has about a 50% pass rate, so keep that in mind.
For the candidates that you put through, it's worth keeping a close eye on how they perform at stage 3 & stage 4 and seeing how they have done. Did those flags that you have ultimately lead to them failing, should you have just said no? Where flags that you had actually not a problem, if so, how can you dig in to them better next time to understand them better.
You should try and keep your approach relatively consistent for the first 5-10 interviews so you can then introduce changes afterwards and see if they yield better or worse results. If anything is very obviously not working, change it immediately.
How to keep improving as an interviewer
- Regularly shadow other interviewers, have other interviewers shadow you. Give each other feedback
- Speak with Talent Partners, ask for their feedback
- Ask exec's why they gave specific scores about candidates you interviewed
- Keep track of how the candidates you have assessed get on in the later stages