I applied through a recruiter, and the process took three weeks.

• First round: A one-hour technical interview with the Tech Lead. The questions were related to what I had on my CV or related to the job spec.
• Second round: A take-home assignment. Code assignments do require more time than live coding or LeetCode challenge interviews, but I believe it's much more valuable.
• Third round: A two-hour interview with two Principal Engineers. It was a code review, technical question, design exercise, and presentation. A two-hour interview can be intimidating, but the questions and design exercise were reasonable, and the engineers were friendly and helpful.

I put it down as difficult not so much for the difficulty of the questions asked during the interviews; it's more about how much the process demands of you.

Jonathan, the internal recruiter, was fantastic throughout the whole process. He made sure I had the time I needed to complete the assignment, he worked around my schedule to arrange the final interview, I got feedback on the same day, and he worked hard getting the job offer and contract over the line.

General concepts about Kafka, Scala, Akka, databases, scalability, and error handling.