Up until the phone interview, everything was great: the recruiter was friendly, and the engineer who conducted the phone interview was great. The onsite round was the polar opposite. The recruiter changed, and the new recruiter was mechanical. On the "onsite prep" call, they read from a script and avoided answering clarifying questions. As several other people have mentioned, the coding rounds were not interviews but rather observations on a code pair tool with no debugging support. The behavioral round was a rapid-fire question round, and my system design round was given by an engineering manager.

Overall, it seemed the company, being new and in the spotlight a lot lately, is still trying to figure out the interview process.

My two cents of advice would be:

• Treat your candidates as your customers; make them feel good about the experience. It doesn't hurt to be nice.
• Do not have a manager give system design interviews. A system design has way too many nuances, and engineering experience matters in understanding them.
• The coding interview doesn't need to be an observation. If the goal is to see if the candidate can write a lot of clean and understandable code within a short period, give them the option to use an IDE, which is the natural coding environment. Also, coding is a very learnable skill, and typically senior candidates will code slower; these are just some things to keep in mind.
• Recruiters could be a little more professional and personable. I understand you all are probably very busy, but again, it doesn't hurt to be nice and treat candidates as your customers.

It's out there.

Google it.