Please don't be biased by what I am going to say.

All of the interviews and interviewers were great. I felt really welcomed by the company and my potential teammates. Everyone was kind and charming, and even the more technical interviews felt like a coffee chat, not a formal, Facebook-like interview. The process, end to end, was really amazing. The tech recruiters guided me through it, and my potential manager was available to answer any questions.

The interviews were difficult, but it was a pleasure because they were all based on real-world examples and things you would expect to work on daily.

Even though everything went well and I passed the interviews (which shouldn't be news to anyone), Cloudflare does not pay above market. It actually pays below market with total compensation plus RSUs. I think that's fine and fair because the company has a strong brand name (you can even check Matthew Prince's tweets about it). What I didn't realize is how awfully they managed the after-interview process.

The moment I said I wanted to see if there was room for negotiation, they just closed the door, and everything went sideways. I had to email them every time to ask for a meeting or remind them that I was waiting for their answer. It is truly sad that a company with such present and future potential treats people who really want to work with them this way.

I hope anyone who reads this does not have the same experience as I did. For me, it was like an idol falling; Cloudflare was one of my top 5 companies to work for, ever.

Technical questions were more or less like:

• Screening: They would give you access to a VM with a bunch of exercises that go from Linux internals to programming. It was very nice, and the interviewer stayed with you at all times.
• 1st Tech: Open discussion about distributed systems with two examples on "how would you debug or do this?"
• 2nd Tech: Pair-programming interview. A typical interview about data structures and algorithms. You don't have to be O(1) obsessed, but know where the potential benefits and drawbacks are, and understand where the areas of improvement lie. Understand whether your code is memory or CPU bound.
• Cultural Interviews: More like a coffee chat. Describe situations at work, how you work things out, etc.