I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 months.

I initially had a call with a recruiter to discuss a full-stack role but was informed that my backend-leaning experience wasn't a good fit at the time. A month later, I received an email from the head of engineering about a new backend role they were looking to fill. We scheduled a 30-minute hiring manager (HM) screen. After waiting for 10 minutes, I emailed to confirm the meeting. The HM joined a few minutes later but did not extend the call to make up for the late start. I progressed to the next round, which involved a 60-minute system design question with an engineer on the team. After passing that round, I was sent a technical take-home project, estimated to take 8-10 hours, and was compensated for it. A virtual on-site was then scheduled, consisting of three parts: 1) Reviewing the project with a panel of the current team 2) A behavioral interview 3) A 75-minute interview with the same HM.

During the first interview with the HM and the team, I discussed the optimizations I would have added with more time, which was an expected point of discussion. In a roundabout way, they asked if I had professional experience with those technologies. When it was clear I didn't have direct experience implementing the optimizations I mentioned, they seemed to lose interest. After this, the HM ended the interview 20 minutes early and canceled the rest of the day's interviews. In my opinion, this was quite unprofessional. It is common decency to inform an interviewee that if a round doesn't go well, the rest of the schedule might be canceled. I didn't get any notification before seeing the invites disappear from my calendar, which was pretty demoralizing.

I then got an email saying the team felt puzzled by some parts of my design and didn't get the clarity they hoped for from my replies. It's fine if they wanted someone with specific experience in those technologies, but I think we could have saved a lot of time, as I never indicated working with those technologies on my resume or in any prior discussions. But more importantly, the way the process ended left a bitter impression.

System Design of a game, and technical take home that tests scaling an operation