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Nooks

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Nooks is a startup that provides an AI-powered sales platform designed to help sales development teams with tasks like automated dialing, prospecting, and coaching. It is known for its AI sales assistant tools aimed at boosting the productivity of outbound sales representatives.

6 interview notes · updated Jul 2026

Nooks·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
Interviewed for a software engineering role at Nooks and got a web crawler problem. Pretty classic BFS question but the follow-up discussion about complexity and revisiting pages is where it got interesting.
  • Given a start URL and a function that returns all hyperlinks on a page, write a function that crawls and returns all reachable pages on the same hostname using breadth-first traversal, visiting each URL at most once.
  • How do you prevent the crawler from visiting the same URL more than once?
  • What are the time and space complexities of your crawler solution?

“I went straight to BFS with a queue and a visited set, which was the right call.”

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Nooks·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026
System design round at Nooks for a software engineer role, focused entirely on scaling a web crawler into a production-grade distributed service. Pretty intense scope for a single question.
  • Design a distributed web crawler that can traverse a large number of pages efficiently, respects rate limits per host, handles retries and partial failures, scales across multiple workers, and includes deduplication, backoff, fairness across domains, and observability.

“This is a beast of a question because it's basically five questions in one.”

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Nooks·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026
System design round at Nooks for a software engineer role, basically a Twitter clone question that sounds straightforward until you get into feed generation and celebrity accounts and realize there's a lot of ground to cover.
  • Design a simplified Twitter-like system that supports user accounts, following, posting short text, a profile timeline, and a home feed showing posts from followed accounts.

“I started with requirements and APIs which felt safe, but the interviewer kept pushing toward the feed generation part and I hadn't fully committed to a strategy yet.”

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Nooks·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Nooks had me do a live debugging round for a software engineer role, basically fixing a broken full-stack YouTube watch party app in real time. The starter code was provided and publicly available on GitHub, so you can actually look at it beforehand if you know what's coming.
  • Given a broken full-stack 'YouTube watch party' app with starter code, identify and fix bugs across the frontend, backend, and WebSocket synchronization logic so that multiple users can watch a video together with synced playback, a working chat sidebar, and basic room management.

“This was a lot to hold in your head at once.”

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Nooks·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Apr 2026
System design round at Nooks for a software engineering role, basically a full Twitter design question. Pretty involved conversation covering a lot of ground on the architecture side.
  • Design a system like Twitter, covering posting tweets, following users, viewing a home timeline, search, and notifications.

“The timeline piece is where things got interesting and also where I spent most of my time.”

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Nooks·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Apr 2026
Nooks software engineer interview with a system design round focused on building a web crawler. The core problem was straightforward but the follow-up on scaling and politeness policies is where it got real.
  • Design a web crawler that starts from a seed URL, uses BFS to traverse pages, visits each URL only once, and stays within the same domain.
  • Your crawler makes API calls to fetch pages. How do you prevent it from becoming a bottleneck or getting flagged as a DDOS attacker?

“The BFS structure came naturally, tracking visited URLs with a set, queuing up links as you fetch each page.”

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