I applied online. The process took two weeks.

The interview process was the same as mentioned on the Demystifying the Backend Engineering Interview Process blog page on their website. However, I got rejected in the take-home review round. All of the interviewers involved were really nice and warm, and they seemed to have a good internal company culture. The take-home code review round was good in some areas but seemed vague in others, such as scaling.

The interviewer was asking questions while trying not to hint at the answers, and in that process the questions turned out to be super vague, with some getting lost in translation. The interviewer constantly referred to "semaphores" as workers, which is conceptually incorrect. I also want to add that referring to semaphores as "workers" confused me as to whether the discussion was about scaling in a distributed production setup or something specific to my test code. This missing distinction disrupted my thought process, and I got lost thinking about what they were expecting rather than taking an analytical approach to the answer. It looks like they expect specific answers to some of those questions. This pattern is evident if you look at others' interview experiences here.

There was a crawler take-home test, scaling, retry mechanisms, and the advantages and disadvantages of each choice of data structure, etc.