I was contacted by a recruiter who forwarded my details to a hiring manager. That hiring manager contacted me and, after some introductory chat, asked me to solve a code challenge.

I completed the code challenge, which took about 4 hours of my time. It seemed to impress the hiring manager and the team.

Then, I was phone screened by an engineer, which went well. For some reason, the hiring manager directed me to a different position, so I was contacted by a different hiring manager. I had another phone screen with another engineer from this second hiring manager, which also went pretty well.

To my surprise, I was directed back to the initial hiring manager for some reason and invited to an onsite interview. I attended the scheduled onsite, which consisted of about 5 interviews in a row, most of them around 45 minutes long, focusing on technical and behavioral questions. I had the impression that I performed well in all interviews. Some whiteboard sketching was involved in one or two interviews.

Apart from the technical aspects, which I solved fairly well, I was also very honest about my likes and dislikes during the behavioral questions, including potential reasons for leaving my current employer. I suspect this openness may have raised some red flags or concerns for some interviewers, and this might have influenced their decision against me. It's perhaps down to cultural aspects that I'm not used to yet. Anyhow, I prefer honesty and directness instead of making something up to shine; maybe it wasn't the perfect approach for them.

In the end, I wasn't extended an offer. This could be because I appeared too direct on certain soft skills, or perhaps I'm too senior (and expensive?) for the position they were hiring for (currently with a FANG company). Alternatively, they might have been kind and wanted to make my decision easier (sometimes interviewers might actually help by rejecting someone they like if they aren't happy with their own future prospects at that company).

I'll never know the real reason, but I do think they have a pretty good hiring process.

Design a scalable REST service to store some secrets.