The initial screening interview with the recruiter went well, containing usual tech screening questions about your abilities to understand simple technical terms, your experience, etc. The interviewing process promised to be short, about 2 weeks.

I was told that there would be 3 rounds of interviews:

• Technical + HackerRank task
• People management skills
• Final cultural fit

This was confirmed by the recruiter, who stated they don't drop candidates after the first tech interview but proceed to review their abilities in different areas.

The first technical interview was with 2 Principal Engineers from one of the departments. Both interviewers seemed dull and disconnected during the whole 1-hour interview. We started with simple introductions of ourselves and went straight into questioning, without any introduction to the company's technical stack, etc.

The interview itself felt more like an interrogation. I was left with 2 minutes for my questions, and their answers were very formal, without any details. The interview ended with a formal "the recruiter will contact you." After that interview, I felt unwelcome.

I waited 3 days for some kind of feedback or an automatic rejection email - nothing, none, silence.

I wrote an email to the recruiter who screened me, expressing my indignation about the silence after the interview. In response, I received: "I'm sorry, what we can do better next time." Still, there was no indication whether I passed the tech interview or not.

Q: Let's create the infrastructure architecture for an Instagram clone application, starting from a single bare-metal machine running both the application and the database.

Q: You had an initial 100 internal users and are now growing. How would you scale your application?

Q: How would you scale your application to multiple region datacenters (US and EU, for example)?