Have you gotten the “how many tennis balls can fit in a plane?” question in an interview? While it is likely a fun conversation starter in some circles, it’s not a question that evaluates criteria. Brainteasers like these don’t give value in the interview outside, making the questioner feel smart. Many other aspects do provide value. I will cover some of my learnings by setting the stage and giving some context.
Klarna has gone through tremendous growth in the past years. Since I joined in 2015, we had ~240 engineers, and nowadays, we have over 1400. Today we are building many more different products for a significantly large customer base in many more markets in this timeframe. By the last count, we are serving 90 million customers 200 000 merchants, with way over 1 million orders placed a day.
All of this growth has meant us entering new markets, building new capabilities in various technologies, which at the end of the day for me as a senior leader, means that we need to hire exceptional high-quality engineers at scale.
Since early 2018 I have served in the role of “pipeline owner” of 2 hiring pipelines called “Java Stockholm” and “Native Stockholm.” For simplicity, I will leave for future texts why we have hiring pipelines, how they function, and focus on one of the pipelines in a subset…