Waste of time. Applied after being contacted by an internal recruiter. During the initial conversation with the recruiter, I outlined my rough salary expectations for the role and was told they seemed fine, so I proceeded further with the interview process.

First stage consisted of a group panel interview with three other AMEX employees, including other engineers and an Engineering Manager. I was asked to complete a simple coding challenge followed by some behavioral questions.

All went well. The next stage was a chat with a Solutions Architect and the Hiring Manager. Questions were a mix of behavioral culture fit as well as technical design questions. This was my favorite part of the interview, as it felt like a normal conversation about technical processes, the stack, how one works, and one's experience with software engineering. No bogus LeetCode questions or 'What is a HashMap?'

After the final interview, I had a catch-up call with the internal recruiter who once again requested salary expectations. Mentioning them once more, I got a follow-up phone call offering $17,000 under my expectations. I was then told they would not budge on this amount.

I struggle to understand the point of asking salary expectations and agreeing with them, then carrying forward with the interview, only to offer me a salary severely under what was discussed.

Word of warning: don't bother interviewing, as they will try to lowball you on the salary.

Coding challenge:

See whether two words go into another word.