I applied online, and the process took six weeks.

My overall impression is mixed. The TLDR is that I went through all stages, and then they ghosted me so I never got any feedback. I am left to assume I did something wrong in the final stage.

The process started with a call with an internal recruiter who talked about my work history to try and gauge my level roughly and explain the rest of the process. The next step was a chat with a senior engineer who talked about projects I had worked on, emphasising my input. Then, I could choose a live-coding exercise or a take-home task to be done in any language. They were pretty relaxed about timeframes. I chose the take-home, which I did in about four to five hours like they suggested, and made it to the next round, so there was no need to spend a whole week on it. Next, I reviewed the take-home with two engineers, and we talked about options to scale up and any trade-offs made that could lead to bottlenecks. Then, if you are successful, there is a behavioural interview and system design. The behavioural was straightforward. The system design was an interesting problem I hadn't seen before. Between each stage, I spoke to the internal recruiter to get feedback. Up until the last stage, it was almost all positive, with only one minor comment about not understanding the Node.js call stack at a low enough level, bearing in mind they use Go.

I was promised a decision and feedback by the end of the week and never heard anything. I emailed and asked for an update and was ignored. The process was good up until the end, and most of the people I met were very nice and knowledgeable and seemed like they would be good co-workers. I didn't gel with the folks running the system design. This interview felt quite antagonistic, and their approach was rather aggressive and seemed to be based on belittling the candidate. Perhaps given that in mind, it's a good thing they ghosted me. Still, I'd like to have received some feedback at least and a decision so I wasn't left waiting. It seems like ghosting people is the done thing judging by other reviews, which is quite embarrassing for them given the promises they make on customer service and how attentive they are at the beginning.

How to scale up the take-home task.

Trade-offs made with the take-home task.

Behavioral questions around complex projects, coaching, unforeseen obstacles, and persuasion.