I applied through a recruiter. Pure Storage had approached me twice before, but I declined because the compensation and lack of remote flexibility were not competitive. This time I decided to give the process a chance.

The first step was a HackerRank assessment consisting of roughly eight fairly long coding/CS-style challenges. I completed it, but already found the format surprisingly disconnected from the seniority of the role. The position was advertised as MTS5 / Technical Lead, focused on security, architecture, distributed systems, ownership, mentoring, and technical leadership. After passing the assessment, the next step was another approximately 3-hour technical interview centred heavily around coding exercises. That is where I withdrew.

For a senior technical leadership position, spending this much of the process on artificial coding challenges feels excessive and poorly targeted. It tests interview-specific problem solving much more than architecture, production debugging, security design, system tradeoffs, technical judgment, ownership, or the experience required to lead complex engineering work. The process also seems to have remained very similar for years, despite experienced candidates raising the same concern.

The role itself sounded interesting, but the interview process made it significantly less attractive. Combined with no remote flexibility and compensation that has historically not stood out, it is difficult to justify investing several more hours into this kind of evaluation when other companies assess senior engineers in ways much closer to the actual job. I would need to see a materially different interview process before considering another opportunity with Pure Storage.