I submitted an application through their careers portal and received an email three weeks later from an engineering manager. He asked simple questions about my background and outlined the process:

• Initial interview
• Take-home coding exercise
• Technical interview with the team manager
• Offer

I was then sent a take-home coding exercise, which I submitted in less than 24 hours. It involved performing a TLS handshake with their server and decrypting a link to a Google Docs form. They took a week to respond.

I arranged the interview with the team manager. The interview lasted 30 minutes, with only 10 minutes allocated for a single technical question. This question was a system design problem to design the parts of a Message Authentication Code (MAC) system. I found this peculiar, as MAC is a cryptographic concept or primitive, not a product with its own system.

Furthermore, the manager was quite dismissive. With his accent, I struggled to understand half of what he was saying. He explicitly stated that they were having logistical issues relocating someone from Singapore and that I would be the backup hire, depending on how that relocation proceeded. Hearing this, I immediately lost interest in the position and the company.

He also mentioned that they don't follow Agile but use Waterfall in three-month cycles.

Three days later, I received a response stating they had gone with another candidate. I assume this was the candidate from Singapore.

Perform a TLS handshake with a Cloudflare worker service and decrypt the response, which contained a link to a Google form.

Also, do a system design for a Message Authentication Code system in 10 minutes, without a whiteboard, and over the phone.