The interview process consisted of a first call with the recruiter, a coding screening session, and then a set of four other virtual or onsite interviews.

The technical interviews were the usual, boring, and pointless Codility tests. On one hand, they are not strict about getting everything right, which is good. On the other hand, these tests are close to being totally useless. So, rather than removing them, they throw one more at you, hoping this would provide (self-induced) "signals".

Regarding the architectural question: I'm not sure about the value of forcing someone to make final decisions in 10 minutes on something that should be well-thought-out and would require at least a couple of cycles to fully understand the requirements within the company. I'm sure they would claim that there is some super-smart reason for this that nobody can grasp, not even real psychologists and subject matter experts.

Anyway, I was rejected for a lack of unspecified experience/skill. If I understand correctly, I was capable of this, but it wasn't investigated. There were no questions on real-world experience; all of their questions could be answered by an inexperienced engineer with a bit of Codility and YouTube "training". I guess this is what they are actually looking for, despite the job title.

Overall, the people were nice. I enjoyed one interviewer especially; they were very friendly, helpful, and transparent. I'm sure the company and the environment are good, but their interview process isn't effective (I doubt this leads to good hiring decisions) and it wasted my time. They could have stopped me early on or simply asked more meaningful questions.

What is a CI/CD pipeline?

What is software quality?

High-level architectural questions, including those related to Codility.