Started with a simple phone interview. Next step was a take-home assessment. Third step was a two-hour interview and in-person coding challenge.

Take-home assessment was easy-moderate difficulty and showed what I thought was an appropriate amount of skill required.

Interview was by mostly junior engineers. It's uncommon that a technical interview by less-experienced engineers goes well, and this was no exception; the interviewers thought they were hot stuff with lots of gotchas and the in-person coding was a total surprise prefaced with "I want this to run as-is as you write it."

I'm no stranger to difficult tasks or questions but in my experience data engineering is more about design than programming, and the team doing the interviews clearly had little experience in such roles because most of the technical questions were programming-centric.

Tell us about why you coded the take-home assessment the way you did.