I spoke with a recruiter who set up the initial phone screen. Their interview platform worked well, and I enjoyed the exercise, which was to build a caching system. The interviewer was pleasant and gave me an opportunity to ask questions as well.

Four follow-up interviews were then scheduled soon after:

• A technical (programming) interview
• A design/architecture interview
• A team fit call with a manager
• A culture fit interview

The manager on the fit call was very open and easy to talk to. They told me a lot about the team, and I felt like I got a good sense of what the job would be like. The design challenge was to build a system architecture, a database ERD, and a basic API spec. I wasn't asked any particularly difficult questions; it all went smoothly and seemed like pretty basic stuff.

The technical interview presented a great problem that seemed simple at first but quickly revealed itself to be complex as you dug into it. The task was to build a simple storage and retrieval system, but with the catch that it must have O(1) time complexity. After clearing up the requirements and exploring a naive approach, it became clear that something more was needed. I suggested a doubly-linked list, but the interviewer immediately shot that down and suggested I stick with arrays. I didn't argue, but I still don't understand why that suggestion was made, as it resulted in a much more complex solution. The interviewer gave me a couple of hints in the right direction, and I put together a seemingly working solution. After writing a series of tests, I found some edge cases and was still a few lines short of finishing them when time was called. The interviewer reassured me that I did great and most people never even discover those edge cases.

Shortly after the third interview, I got a notice from the recruiter saying they had decided not to move forward. No other feedback was given, so I'm not sure what the decision was based on. I was given no indication that my performance was lacking; in fact, I was told the opposite.

I'm hesitant to even bring this up, but just in case there is a pattern that other candidates might be able to see, it's worth noting that my identity as LGBTQ+ would have been apparent in the video calls. I don't intend this as any sort of accusation, as without any feedback about why their decision was made, there's no reason to believe this was a consideration over anything else.

If others had a similar experience and mention it here, then maybe a pattern can be identified and it should be questioned. If that doesn't happen, I think it's safe to ignore this bit and chalk up the whole experience to simply not having been a good fit for some other reason.

I don't like to reveal specific interview questions because it's frustrating as an interviewer to have to switch questions every time they get leaked. One that was already mentioned here was building a caching system.

The other programming challenge was pretty standard, and if you spend some time on HackerRank, you should be prepared for it.