The hiring process involved four coding interviews, one cultural fit interview, and a recruiter call after each step. They seem to be attempting to emulate the hiring process of FAANG companies, but without much success.

The interviews themselves were relatively easy. Recruiters were friendly and prompt with their responses. However, the primary missing ingredient appears to be technical competence within the interviewing team. I would not consider reapplying.

My suggestion to the company would be to remember that evaluation is a two-way street. Candidates are also evaluating the company during the process. Please ensure that your actions align with your stated values (e.g., openness to ideas or collaboration).

Here are some of the red flags I observed during the process:

• I met a director who spent approximately ten minutes of a forty-minute interview speaking negatively about their previous employer.
• I met a principal engineer who works in data deduplication and replication across a cluster. After completing an exercise within the first thirty minutes and then discussing advanced topics at the interviewer's request, I realized they had no understanding of Hash or Merkle trees, which are commonly used for replicating data changes across cluster nodes. They consistently steered the conversation towards expected answers and did not consider alternative solutions.
• I met a senior engineer working on a build automation tool. After completing the given exercise in twenty minutes, we began discussing build management for real-world systems. This individual was unfamiliar with Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) and topological sorting, concepts fundamental to building dependency graphs in automated build systems and determining parallel execution order. While it's acceptable not to know everything, the feedback I received was that I had chosen complex solutions, which only confirmed my reservations.

These experiences led me to believe there was a lack of technical competence.

• Regex for matching a pattern
• Renaming directories in a directory tree
• Identifying concurrency issues
• Automating a build process given a list of source files
• Optimizing data storage by avoiding multiple copies.