I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks.

A recruiter reached out because I have deep experience at web crawling. I said I'm happy where I am, but they kept following up so I decided to give Exa a chance.

First step was an online technical interview, but the interviewer didn't show up. Rescheduled, and the interview turned out to be unrelated to web crawling, the experience they were apparently recruiting me for.

Next step was an onsite in SF. At this point I didn't have enough information to decide if interested, but was open to hearing more and had some friends I wanted to catch up with in SF anyway.

Unfortunately, the onsite was a waste of time:

• They just gave me a project to work on in isolation for 2 days, which again was unrelated to web crawling.
• I could have done this from home.
• They didn't try to convince me about the position or share what challenges I could help them with if I joined.
• In fact, they actively discouraged me from joining.
• The guy evaluating me made hostile comments, such as "people from my current workplace ruined the company culture."
• At no time did anyone try to evaluate my experience at web crawling, the skill they were supposedly hiring for.
• The one positive point is I enjoyed chatting with people during the meals.

To save everyone time, I considered cancelling the rest of the onsite, but was concerned whether they would still pay for my return ticket, so I stayed until the end and worked on my own projects.

Turns out this was a valid concern, as after returning home they did not respond when I tried to get an expense reimbursed.