Applied online.

The recruiting team was really helpful, and I can only say positive things about them.

I had an initial general phone call with a tech lead, followed by two phone interviews (via Google Hangouts): one for system design and the other for the management part.

The system design interview was with a Lyft employee in London. This employee was very friendly and professional. They asked me a system question as expected, but also inquired about managing projects, people, etc. I'm unsure if my replies were what they were looking for, as I never received feedback for the interviews. However, the questions made sense, and the overall discussion was very pleasant.

Then, I had the management discussion with a person in California. At the very beginning, they asked me about my best team so far. I replied with my current team (which is true), and then they became very aggressive, essentially stating that if this was the case, I shouldn't be changing jobs. Apparently, it was hard for them to imagine that people might want to change location or move to a company they consider better for professional growth. After that, they spoke several times about my "perfect team," being very ironic and unprofessional towards me, to the point where I had to stop our discussion and tell them that this was something I never said; I only stated it was the best I had. They then asked me about a conflict within my current team and how I resolved it. I explained that my current team is small, the people fit very well together, and generally, I haven't had to resolve internal conflicts, only those with people from other teams. The interviewer again made no effort to hide their strong dislike for my response, which I do not consider the most professional approach. They were not interested in how I might have solved conflicts in past teams or anything else; they were just openly challenging what I told them. Finally, they asked a couple of questions about diversity and finished the interview about 10 minutes early, which was quite a relief.

On one hand, I think I should never have applied to Lyft, as then I would have avoided this really unpleasant experience of the last interview. On the other hand, now I know, so I can avoid this company in the future. Most people I interacted with were okay, but even the slightest chance of working with the last interviewer makes it impossible for me to ever consider Lyft again.

How do you design a system for access control using optical recognition?