Alpha Law Full-Stack Engineer Experience

Role: Full-Stack Engineer

Company: Alpha Law

Experience: 7+ years

Initial Screening Round

The recruiter asked about my current role, previous projects and the kind of full-stack work I had handled, discussed my responsibilities and overall experience.

There wasn't any major coding or system-design discussion in this round.

After the screening, I received the take-home assignment.

Take-Home Assignment - Google Workspace Assistant

The assignment was to build a chat-based assistant integrated with Google Workspace, idea was that instead of manually moving between different Google applications, a user could interact with the assistant through natural-language queries.

The application needed to support actions such as:

• Search through emails.

• Search calendar events.

• Find information from Google Drive.

• Answer questions using retrieved information.

• Send an email on behalf of the user.

• Create or schedule calendar events.

• Perform other supported Workspace actions through the chat interface.

So this wasn't only about building a chatbot UI. I also had to think about authentication, Google APIs, handling different user intents and connecting the frontend with the backend actions.

I completed the assignment and submitted a working version.

Round 2 - Assignment Review and Architecture Discussion

This round went much deeper than I expected.

The interviewer first asked me to walk through the codebase properly, how I had structured different components, how a request travelled through the application and why I had implemented certain parts in a particular way.

Then came the scalability question:

How would you redesign this if we had to support one million users?

Discussed areas such as handling concurrent requests, authentication and user sessions, API rate limits, background processing, caching and separating different responsibilities as the system grew.

This was where I struggled.

While building the assignment, I had relied heavily on AI-assisted/vibe coding to move quickly. The application worked, but during the review I couldn't confidently explain some parts of the generated code or justify why the codebase had been structured that way.

For an experienced engineering role, that gap became very visible once the interviewer started asking deeper follow-ups.

Final Result

I was rejected after the assignment-review round. The useful lesson for me wasn't that using AI tools was necessarily the problem. The problem was submitting code that I didn't understand deeply enough to defend.