I applied through a recruiter. The process took two weeks.

I applied for Principal/Architect. There was an exploratory call with the hiring manager, followed by a few more technical rounds. Since this position is for Principal/Architect, I was appalled by the rounds. Shockingly, there was no design round; rather, everything was just yet another SRE round. I am glad that it didn't go through.

The exploratory call with the HM went well.

The coding round, which you might call an "I know more than you" round, featured an amateur interviewer who claimed to be a Lead DevOps engineer. The problems he threw were neither from competitive coding nor from real-life scenarios. He picked an absurd topic from Python that you might either solve differently or never use in your life, and he was very adamant that it be solved in the method he thought of and understood. Above all, he struggled a lot to explain the problem itself and always wanted the answer that he had in his mind. Then he threw Python jargon around, mostly to show off that he knew more than you.

The technical deep dive was with one of the team members, and it focused mostly on the resume.

Then there was a bar raiser. verall, the interview process was nowhere closer to PSRE or SRE Architect.

• Observed that all these SREs are from the same or a similar company and culture. You may fit in if you are from the same company.
• The tech stack is a bit absurd IMHO, and mostly the team keeps reinventing the same wheel which is already available in the open source.

Thanks to that interviewer, I will not opt for CRED again. If you are a Python developer with a bit of system knowledge, you may go through this.