I applied through a staffing agency. The process took 2 weeks.

Connected to HR through headhunter:

• 45 min call with HR to check interest and if my experience aligns with the position.
• Get-to-know call with hiring manager.
• Technical onsite 3 hrs with different team members.

To my surprise, 2 people showed up on round 2 in place of 1. The discussion round became a technical round, and both interviewers decided to take 30 min each to grill me on Data Engineering, Data Science, and System Design skills.

The Data Science guy was a recent PhD. It all got confusing for the first 20 min trying to understand the data science requirement, and by the time I started, time was up.

The Data Engineering interviewer seemed to be a fairly new grad with limited understanding of system design and expected answers within his limits. He didn't even have an idea of NoSQL DB and asked me to mold my system design answer into RDBMS so he could understand.

Overall, my solution was pretty good and addressed the problem, but he wasn't satisfied. When asked about the correct solution, he somehow gave me an answer which itself seemed to be missing key points.

I think they don't really understand the problem they are trying to resolve. Giving less experienced guys a chance to interview is great, but they should be trained enough to understand that a correct solution is not just what they think it is, and neither is answering questions to their expectation what makes a candidate qualified.

A classification problem to be solved on Google Colab.

A MeetElise email system design problem.