CarGurus Interview Process - Mid-level Software Engineer

An interviewer from CarGurus reached out to me directly about the role, and that led to a phone screen. I didn’t end up getting an offer, but I came away with a good sense of what they’re looking for. To prepare, I spent most of my time on LeetCode, brushing up on JavaScript, and reviewing system design, especially data pipelines and batch processing.

The phone screen was a conversation about my background, a few recent projects, and why I was interested in CarGurus. After that, I was invited to a four-hour onsite with four rounds.

For system design, I was asked to design a feature on the product page that tracks which users view each car listing and sends that information to the dealer. It had to run as a batch process that could scale as traffic grew. Be ready to walk through how view events get captured on the page, where they’re stored before processing, how they’re grouped by dealer, and how the data reliably reaches dealers as volume increases. Related practice: Ad Click Event Aggregation. This covers event ingestion and aggregation, with different reporting requirements.

The two JavaScript rounds were very similar. In both, I had to pull car listings from an API endpoint and then filter and organize the results based on a set of criteria. Make sure you’re comfortable handling async requests, and talk through your approach as you write the code.

The last round was a behavioral interview with the hiring manager. Most of the questions focused on leadership and on times I had taken ownership of something on my own, without much direction.

LeetCode and system design will be your best friends. For coding, practice fetch, async/await, error handling, and array methods like filter, map, reduce, and sort. For the behavioral round, have two or three solid stories about leading and owning your work, and know what the outcome was.