04 — Core questions
Describe a production system you built or significantly contributed to.
Scale, technical decisions, tradeoffs. What would you do differently today?
Required (min. 300 characters).
Tell us about something you shipped in under 2 weeks.
Context, intentional shortcuts, what didn't make the cut and why.
Required.
Describe a time you disagreed with a technical decision made by your team.
What was the disagreement? How did you handle it? What was the outcome?
Required.
In your own words — what problem does Profound solve, and why does it matter?
Don't use their website copy. We want to know if you actually get it.
Required.
05 — Role-specific question
↳ Forward Deployed Engineer
You're onboarding a new enterprise client. Their engineering team pushes back on your recommended integration approach. How do you handle it?
Walk us through how you'd navigate the disagreement while keeping the relationship intact and the implementation on track.
Required.
↳ Software Engineer, Frontend
Walk us through a UI component or interaction you're genuinely proud of.
What made it hard? Decisions about performance, accessibility, or design fidelity? Link to it if you can.
Required.
↳ Software Engineer, Backend
You need to process data from 5+ AI platforms (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini...) in near real-time, at scale. Sketch your architecture.
Ingestion strategy, expected bottlenecks, what you'd monitor first.
Required.
↳ Software Engineer, Fullstack
You're the only engineer on a new internal tool that needs to be live in 10 days. Stack, cuts, and how you ship.
We want to see how you think about tradeoffs when speed is the constraint.
Required.
↳ Design Engineer
Show us something you built where design and code were inseparable — where the implementation WAS the design.
Link to a live project or repo. Explain decisions that couldn't have been made without being both designer and engineer.
Required.
↳ Product Designer
Show us a design decision on a B2B product that was driven by data or user research — not intuition.
The insight, what you changed, the impact. Link to case study or Figma file if possible.
Required.