The initial recruiter call was informative and the two technical interviews were fairly comfortable. The first technical interview with a Principal Engineer was very domain-specific, testing for hands-on experience with React through a "real-world" exercise that was pretty pleasant to work with.

The second technical interview with a Team Lead was supposed to be centered around the topic of "system design," but to be fair, it only covered one single system design question in under 5 minutes, which seemed a bit too rushed. The conversation with the Tech Lead was good anyway, despite the diminished emphasis on system design.

Overall, everybody at Elastic who I talked to was very friendly, and neither of the interviews required any of the standard "LeetCode interview prep." However, the system design interview lacked sufficient depth and could be explored more thoroughly to allow building a more productive conversation. I would certainly interview with Elastic again in the future, as the technical challenges are quite exciting and the organization offers plenty of career growth opportunities through its career ladder matrix.

Talk about a project that you worked on and what was its system design.