I came in via Triplebyte, so I was able to skip the phone interview part of their process and go straight to the onsite.

The interview itself was reasonable and was, in fact, probably my best performance in a technical interview of my life. I was asked questions around software engineering, data structures, algorithms, machine learning, infrastructure, architecture, and tooling. I aced it, blasting through the basic questions and even exhausting the "harder" variations until the interviewers ran out of constraints to add to the problems. At that point, we just kind of chatted about culture, work environment, and experiences we've each had playing around with different stacks.

The culture fit was excellent, and we were all feeling the match. They used Google's Bazel build system extensively, and as a former member of that team, I also received quite a bit of instant street cred for designing many of its core features.

All of which is to say that I had everything going as well as possible for me, and could not imagine any way the interview could have possibly gone better.

I received an offer a couple of days later but was surprised to see that they underleveled me relative to every other company I spoke with, offering over $100k/year less in compensation as a result.

I tried to appeal this with the recruiter, but their committee was flatly unwilling to reconsider its level assignment for any reason. If I'm to believe what the recruiter told me, they simply do not directly hire Staff Engineers. They tried to sell me hard on the inferior offer but ultimately could not go far enough out of the band they placed me in to match or even approximate the other higher-level offers I received, so I was forced to turn the offer down.

I still retain a positive impression of the company, but I don't see any way I can ever work here without taking a big step down in my career.

Design a software architecture which can scale file access to millions of concurrent users.