All interviews are quite standard in terms of difficulty, and the recruiters do a very good job at keeping you informed, coordinating interviews, and giving information about the organization for which you'd interview.

Unfortunately:

• It's the longest hiring process I've ever had (including those of FAANG companies). For an SRE position, it consists of:

  • 1-hour screening (coding + project deep dive)
  • A take-home project (they say it's 3-4 hours, but it's more like 5-6 hours)
  • Four "face-to-face" interviews of 1 hour each (coding, system, system design, culture fit) – for a total of approximately 10 hours. Moreover, in every single interview, I had to introduce myself (2-5 minutes) and talk about a project I did (5-10 minutes), which felt like needless overhead.

• I got not-too-friendly vibes from some of the interviewers, a display of a snobby attitude and gatekeeping practices, as if they thought they were the coolest kids on the block.

• I was told I'd passed all interviews and they really liked me, but the team I was interviewing with expected me to be more familiar with their stack (k8s, etc.), so they didn't make an offer. At that point, the recruiter told me they would try to propose me to other teams at Datadog. This ultimately didn't work out with my timeline. That's overall negative, in my opinion, as it shows that:

  • They focus on specific knowledge of tools rather than engineering principles, background, and education.
  • They don't have a company-wide, well-coordinated hiring process, but rather rely on an "ad-hoc internal talent market." The whole idea of "you didn't quite pass with this team, but hang on, let me see if there's another team that wants you" feels just lame, frustrating, and borderline unprofessional.

DFS, greedy algorithm. Questions related to DD products or architecture for the onsites.