This by far was the most disorganized and dysfunctional interview process I have ever had in my career -- to the point where it's hard for me to believe any of the positive software engineering reviews on Glassdoor with respect to DO. I'm an engineer with over 5+ years of experience, and I've been through the wringer with interviews, but this one gets a Gold Star for worst interview experience ever. First, I was initially interviewing for a role on the Growth & Onboarding team, after passing a coding interview with a pretty chill engineer, and meeting with the hiring manager, I was informed that they ended up hiring someone that they "knew and had worked with before", but that they were still interested in hiring me for a role that hadn't opened up yet.

After having another discussion with the hiring manager, she told me it wouldn't be available for at least a month. At first, I figure this is just bad luck and decide that I'll reach out to them down the road as I have a job now and am in no rush. So about a 3+ weeks later, I follow up with my recruiter only to learn that she was off on maternity leave, but she was kind enough to get back to me and let me know that my feedback was positive and that she'd look into it. At that point, I ended up then talking to a series of internal recruiters, all with drastically different communication styles, each of which gave me a variety of mostly inaccurate information.

One of these recruiters is actually mentioned on a different review here on Glassdoor, but he refused to answer any emails, would only communicate via unplanned phone calls, and informed me that I was going into a "final interview" when that wasn't the case. Based on how unprofessional he was, I wouldn't be surprised that if you get this recruiter it's quite possible they are already done with you and just trying to string you along.

Anyhow, after some back and forth, I meet with the hiring manager again who tells me that I'm going to have another technical interview with a Staff Engineer and that if it's a good fit I'd get an offer -- and that whether or not it went well she would speak to me again about other opportunities at the company (spoiler alert, that never happened). So I move forward and meet with that Staff Engineer for a technical interview in which he asked me mostly behavioral questions. He was a nice guy and I enjoyed our conversation even though I didn't feel it was very technical.

Afterwards, I was told the feedback was good, but that I was going to interview for yet another team since he didn't think I would enjoy the particular project he was trying to offload. Despite all of the chaos, I appreciated this cause I rather not leave my current job for one that may be worse. This recruiter informed me that I was going in for one "final interview" and that if it went well we'd discuss an offer. I asked for details on the role and what the interview would involve, but was told "let's just see how it goes and take it from there". At this point, I'm exhausted from trying to having a transparent process with them, so I just accept despite the fact that a one hour interview as a final seemed dubious.

What ends up happening is I meet with a pretty strange and socially awkward interviewer who didn't even look straight into the camera while giving the interview. He had been at this company for most of his career, so it seemed like he wasn't particularly experienced in going through the interview process himself. After I clarified what the role was going to be from him, I learned that he actually had no idea that I had interviewed with any of his colleagues -- if that's the case I'm thinking, how could this be a final interview? He then proceeds to ask me a very vague system design question about ensuring continuous availability as a cloud provider for a set of apps / Kubernetes cluster.

He said that the question was "very difficult" and that he was looking for "outside the box" thinking. I do my best and let him know that I don't think continuous availability can be guaranteed, but with a combination of monitoring / alerting, the deployment of failover clusters, and use of data replication we may be able to ensure high availability. He says something to the extent of "well tools like gRPC are great for things like this" which seemed like a) he was looking for a specific solution using tools not listed in my resume b) he wasn't particularly interested in how I thought about the problem, just that I favored some solution he had perhaps implemented himself. By the way, this had nothing to do with the role he described.

In the end, the process took 3+ months and after expressing a lot of interest and passing multiple tech screens, it turned out to be a massive waste of time. The recruiting team even admitted that things were "a mess" and issued me an apology prior to one of my interviews on the phone, but that didn't stop them from ghosting me in the end. I strongly advise you to avoid DO.

• Code a URL shortener
• Give me an example of a time someone disagreed with you on implementation and how you resolved it?
• Tell me some examples of things you like and don't like with respect to the software development lifecycle.
• Given an app (or set of apps) that has to receive all traffic, how would you ensure continuous availability?