The first step was a 20 minute chat with a Canva recruiter about the company and my previous experience followed by a brief (~10 minute) phone screen to ensure I was a legitimate candidate who understood the basics. After that the recruiter asked for my availability for the second interview which was a 1 hour session in HackerRank CodePair with one of Canva's engineers via video chat. The exercise began as basic implementation of an interface in Java and was extended to more complex concerns. It was really well structured and the interviewer was calm, helpful and collaborative. Less than three hours later I received an email from the recruiter asking for my availability for the final interview, which is in two parts over three hours. The first part of the interview was a collaborative solution design session with two of Canva's engineers, with a strong focus on fundamental CS concepts in the abstract rather than in a particular language. After that we took a brief break (a few minutes) and the second part was more pair programming with two different engineers focused on implementation and testing in Java. The different interviewers got together in the morning on the following day and I was given feedback and a verbal offer that day.

The interview process seems to change quite a bit so make sure you look for more recent descriptions of the interviews. However, there were numerous rounds, starting with a recruiter screening, followed by an AI proficiency interview, this process is quite straightforward. However, if you don't have much experience with using Co-Pilot or Cursor, I would recommend practising a bit beforehand by creating a boilerplate project and adding tests. Be careful to check your code for mistakes. Ultimately, this interview tests whether you can debug the mistakes that the AI makes and whether you understand what your code is doing. Next, they gave me a "Programming Language Fluency" interview, a system design interview and a behavioural interview. The Programming Language fluency test was to implement a class that they had come up with. I didn't find it particularly difficult however I would make sure that your dev environment is setup with the correct language. For me there was some confusion over the language to be used however, the recruiters were very helpful when I asked them about it. The system design interview was quite standard, I had to design a system to process card payments. This was a pretty straightforward system design interview though I had read "System Design Interview: an insider's guide" in preparation for another interview which did come in very handy. Finally the behavioural interview was pretty standard. However, it does come after having done the previous two technical interviews in one sitting which I found quite taxing. I didn't pass this one but they did arrange a call to give me good feedback which I did apreciate. I ended up failing the behavioural interview but they gave me some good feedback as to why I didn't pass it which has been helpful for future interviews. The recruiters were extremely helpful whenever I had any questions and so do use them as a resource should there be any ambiguity. In fact they were so pleasant that I left smiling even though I got rejected