The people were very nice throughout the process, but the overall experience was unnecessarily complex.

It felt like all engineers were judged using the same criteria, regardless of their specific fields. Datadog appears to be imitating FAANG interview styles.

I was initially contacted by a recruiter and I was consistently clear that my expertise lies in cloud infrastructure engineering. However, barely any part of the interview process related to my field.

• The recruiter informed me of two 1-hour coding interviews at most, but I ended up having three.
• I asked the coordinator about this discrepancy, and he replied that he would get back to me, but he never did.
• He also stated that coding skills were minimally considered for infrastructure positions, implying I would avoid a LeetCode-centric company. However, I had more coding interviews than anything else in the entire process (3 hours out of 6 total). The primary reason for the 'no offer' was "not enough signal to continue moving forward in this area."

Similarly, the System Design and Experience/Values interviews were problematic.

While being told these interviews were critical for leveling and that I should lead the discussion about a system I owned, within the first two minutes of both interviews, I was immediately met with platform/backend questions. This made them feel like technical interviews rather than discussions about the infrastructure projects I had led.

These types of questions continued throughout the allocated time, preventing me from reframing the conversation or delving deeper into my experience. Consequently, I received feedback about "not getting much depth on the technical depth" again.

Both interviewers for these sessions were also infrastructure engineers. The only moments during the 6-hour process where we discussed anything related to cloud, infrastructure, containers, etc., were during the final 10 minutes of each interview, when I had to ask questions about Datadog.

It genuinely felt like I was interviewing for a different position, as I've read from others in their reviews.

The System Design interview was better, but the expected answers were once again clearly based on backend experience rather than infrastructure.

Coding Interviews:

• Determine the total number of repetitions of words in a paragraph.
• Implement a circular buffer. Circular buffers act as FIFO queues backed by a fixed-size array.
• Streamed Log Matcher. Each query and log comes with a prefix indicating its type ("Q:" for queries and "L:" for logs), and the content is a case-insensitive list of words. The goal is to match logs to the previous queries they correspond to. (Be careful, some of the constraints have a confusing double meaning).
• Re-implement a buffered file wrapper.

System Design:

Design a flight price alert (think Skyscanner).