The interview process started with a phone screen, followed by the option of either a one-hour technical coding session or a take-home assignment. I opted for the take-home assignment, as it better represents how developers work in the real world. Additionally, I don't perform well when under pressure, expected to produce a perfect answer while the interviewer holds the solutions. I've experienced both sides, and neither is enjoyable. I appreciated the flexibility they offered with the choice between a take-home assignment or a technical call.

I must have passed, as the final stage was a virtual on-site interview – a six-hour Zoom call with various individuals from across the company. The discouraging aspect was that two of those sessions were technical interviews. Seriously? I spent three hours coding the take-home assignment, presented my GitHub showcasing real-world libraries with tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of downloads, and you're still going to make me do live technical interviews? It was incredibly annoying and felt like a waste of my time. A six-hour interview marathon is something I would expect from Google or Facebook, not a smaller company like this.

Lesson learned, however: opt for the live coding call over the take-home assignment to save yourself time, as they will likely require live coding anyway. It's a flawed system throughout the industry, and while I've never excelled in them, I consistently produce great code and projects regardless.

Design a scalable system to ingest loan data and send it to different teams for internal consumption.