A recruiter reached out to me via email, stating I might be a good fit for a backend SWE position they had. I completed the first round of interviews, which was essentially a call with an engineer. We worked on a HackerRank problem involving 2D arrays, which was fairly simple.

Following that, they invited me to the final round, consisting of four one-hour calls with engineers and the hiring manager. These included:

• A behavioral interview, where they asked extensively about my current role and presented "tell me about a time" scenarios.
• A HackerRank interview, similar in format to the previous round.
• A system design interview, where I was given a system idea and asked to outline database schemas and potential API endpoints.
• A debugging and testing interview, which covered testing methodologies. I was given broken code on HackerRank and tasked with identifying all issues.

I felt I performed reasonably well in the interviews. However, they ultimately rejected me. The feedback indicated that my lack of experience with their specific tech stack would lead to too long a "ramp-up" time.

This was somewhat frustrating, as they could have assessed this from my resume and avoided putting me through a five-hour interview process.

The HackerRank coding assessments involved writing a method where you take two 2D arrays and perform some type of logic on them.