I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks.

I’ll preface this by saying I had a good experience for the first 3 interviews, it was just the final round one that put a bad taste in my mouth and ruined the whole experience. It was a pretty fast process overall.

• First round: met with the hiring manager to learn about the team and go over my background and experience. I got a good impression. He said the recruiter would be in touch soon to schedule the next interviews.
• Second interview: bring your own system. This went well but it required a lot of prep work. Make sure you know how the system was designed to handle failure cases.
• Third round: coding problem, 3 levels. Not too difficult algorithmic-wise. It was more about structuring the code well. I recommend practicing LeetCode a bit but also class implementations. These two interviews were back-to-back and I got an email that I moved on less than an hour after.
• Fourth round: “topgrade” interview. I put it in quotes because it wasn’t actually a topgrade interview, more so a past technical experience and behavioural interview. The hiring manager from before was there, plus another manager. The HM was pleasant, but it was this other manager who was rude and condescending and ruined the process for me. It felt like he was trying to re-evaluate my technical abilities despite me having already passed the technical rounds. I highly suspect it’s because I’m a woman. His closing line was to tell me that they are interviewing other candidates in the loop but that the recruiter will be in touch. Why bring up other candidates? I left the interview feeling extremely put off.

It’s very unfortunate because like I said, I felt good about the company and process before that interview, even if they seemed a bit too AI-pilled. And for what it’s worth, I did have one woman interviewer in each of the technical rounds, so it’s not a company-wide problem.

There was a discussion of Kafka failure modes in the BYOS interview.