I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks.

I had an internal referral. There was an initial call with a recruiter, followed by a 1-hour interview with an engineering manager and a 3-interview loop stage. The recruiter and the process were great at giving all the info you'd need for each stage so you can prep answers. The initial 1-hour call felt a bit like a grilling, with no real conversation that flowed, as they were clearly following a script. I came out feeling like it hadn't gone well as it felt so unnatural. But then I found out they wanted me to come in for the 3-stage loop. These were a bit more of a chat, but they were clearly still following a script. The systems design interview is okay if you prep, and you should look up the Spotify top K problem.

Unfortunately, I didn't get an offer, just a template email rejection and no feedback. I feel very in the dark about what happened, as it felt the last three stages went pretty well. After the amount of time invested into prepping for the interviews and doing the interviews themselves, the least they could do is offer feedback. Some feedback to the company is to give your candidates feedback, especially if they've gone through all the interview stages. And you should get your interviewers to work on their interview skills; they were either new to it or not very good, and there was no flow or personality to it at all, so I could have been talking to an AI agent.

What is some feedback you've had from a peer or manager?