Recruiter round followed by two panel rounds with the engineering team. You got yes/no decisions each round in a timely manner, so there were no issues with delays or ghosting.

Unfortunately, it seemed clear Rocket was looking for free consulting advice on a major project to upgrade their API infrastructure in the guise of interview questions.

You would meet with the panel the first time, and there were some strange tells from one of the panel members who interestingly did not appear in the final round.

In the final round, they asked many questions not about your technical skills but about the steps you would use, the KPIs, the team members needed, and any factors going into build versus buy to create a new APIM. The panelists seemed very disinterested in candidacy but more interested in the proposed solutions to their problems.

This is an example of a company exploiting the current flood of candidates in the job market to pick the brains of all their candidates. It is likely they hired no one or hired someone extremely cheap and used those notes to execute on their project.

All of these candidates applied to Rocket in good faith, needing a job, in some cases where the ability to pay bills depended on success.

Candidates for Engineering should stay clear of this company or send them invoices for when they magically have that new APIM deployed to production.

Determine the KPIs for implementing APIM.