I applied online.

The initial call with the recruiter was promising, as she was very receptive and seemed eager to move me along in the process. However, everything apart from that was a red flag.

First and foremost, the actual interview question itself did not make sense for a senior software engineer role. It was a 2-hour take-home assessment which allowed us to use AI (and even had three different agents to choose from built into the testing platform), but the task was a LeetCode-style algorithm which any AI could easily solve in seconds. That was my first red flag.

Second was that the question itself was not even properly set up. The question asked that the solution satisfy the tests, but there were no tests. There was also no indication of how inputs were meant to be passed to this program. This more or less made the test useless and it was very confusing.

I completed the assessment and raised my concerns to the recruiter, who apologized and said 8 other candidates had also complained about the question and said the devs were having issues with the testing platform. She offered to let me re-try the assessment after it was corrected, which I decided to do if for no other reason than curiosity.

The second time was arguably worse. They had added a single test that asserted only the most naive happy-path possible for the algorithm, and the variable names actually had typos in them. No testing of edge cases whatsoever.

I completed the assessment -- again, by myself, without having Claude or Codex do it for me -- and I never heard back from them. I'm not sure if they wanted me to solve it with AI or not (which is ridiculous), but given how disorganized the process was, and the fact that the job is still unfilled months later, it makes me think either the company itself is dysfunctional up and down or the position isn't real to begin with.

Implement a LeetCode-style string manipulation algorithm.