At first, I was really impressed with the process. It seemed very transparent, and recruiters gave nice, detailed feedback and preparation guides. However, I felt a bit blindsided post-interviews due to poor expectations set by the recruiters themselves.

For one, their system design and behavioral interviews are not industry standard. The level of "technical depth" they expect you to go into is beyond the scope of preparation materials and more relevant to your actual experience. If you don’t have relevant experience in your past work, they’ll simply say you lack technical depth in the interview, which I find insulting for an on-site interview, especially since that’s what a resume screen is for.

Regarding the coding interview, I was explicitly told multiple times not to expect anything more than a LeetCode medium and that it would focus more on understanding a real-world scenario. I approached the problem with that context. However, it turned out my interviewer gave me a LeetCode hard problem involving DP, misexplained it, and then stated I couldn’t produce a working solution, even though I confusingly thought I had one with time to spare.

One may chalk this up to sour grapes, but the fact that the friendly "feedback" the recruiters gave was so vague that I had to go online and do my own research to find out what I was missing—something that’s usually self-evident right after an interview—is what frustrated me about this overall process.

My advice to prospective applicants is to prepare according to the recruiter advice, but also make sure your experience matches the job requirements and do additional preparation independently. Ironically, for as much as they want to differentiate from a "standard tech company" interview loop and pretend to be more opaque, I found this approach more confusing.

Also, interviewers should be taught to exhibit better etiquette. Overall, it was a great experience there, but it is completely unprofessional and demeaning for an interviewer to start playing with his pet while I’m explaining something.

Onsite:

• Two technical
• Two system design
• Behavioral