Software Engineer

Hello, and welcome from the Syniti Engineering Team!

Thank you for your interest in joining Syniti, we're working on some interesting and challenging problems and are looking for engineers with a growth mindset to join our team. Our interview process helps us learn about you as a person and at a technical level. But it's just as important that you learn about us, our work, and our expectations so you know what you're getting into. We foster a work environment where we are all comfortable and love coming to work each day. We don't hire lightly and expect everyone to contribute on day one.

Let's get started!

Please clone or download this repo and use it for the exercises described below. Once completed you may either send us the URL to your git repo or a zip of the folder.

We have four questions that we like to ask to get a sense of who you are, followed by a coding question we use to understand your technical strengths. You can write your responses to the first four questions directly in the README or as a separate file.

In answering the code question, please submit code as if you intended to ship it to production. The details matter. Tests are expected, as is well-written, simple, idiomatic code. While there are many libraries you could use, we're expecting to mostly see code that you write yourself. Please only use critical libraries for common functionality, such as parsing JSON or writing tests.

We'd recommend you use whatever language you feel strongest in. It doesn't have to be one we use (mostly Go and JavaScript) — we believe good engineers can be productive in any language.

Here are the questions, good luck!

1. What’s your proudest achievement? It can be a personal project or something you’ve worked on professionally. Just a short paragraph is fine, but I’d love to know why you’re proud of it.

2. What's a personal project you're currently working on? This could be a coding side project, hobby, or otherwise real world project you're working on.

3. Tell us about a technical book or article you read recently, why you liked it, and why we should read it.

4. Tell us about one of your favorite products (physical or software) and one specific aspect that makes it truly great.

5. In this repo is a data.json file. It contains an imaginary example set of data a customer might need to migrate from one system to another. It's a JSON encoded array of objects. The customer understands some of the data might be bad and wants to know which records are invalid so they can ensure the new system will only have valid data. Write a program that will read in the data and mark any records:

   1. That are a duplicate of another record
   2. name field is null, missing, or blank
   3. address field is null, missing, or blank
   4. zip is null, missing, or an invalid U.S. zipcode

   Each record has an ID but that should only be used to identify a record, not for validity or duplication testing (eg, two records may be identical but have different IDs).

The output of the program should list the IDs of each invalid or duplicate record, one per line. In the case of duplicates, mark both.

Example:

123ba
439a2
99abc
bac34

If you have any questions about the coding questions, please let us know.