I applied online. The process took four weeks.

I had applied to "Lead Software Engineer" and "Sr. Software Engineer" positions. The recruiter reached out over the phone, saying that the team was very excited about my resume and wanted to bring me straight onsite for the in-person rounds, bypassing any tech-screens. He confirmed this was for the Lead Software Engineer role. This did sound unusual, but my profile has the rare combination of these aspects:

• 12+ years of software development experience.
• Proficient in C#, .NET stack (they use this stack).
• Certified AWS Solutions Architect (they use AWS for their cloud provider).
• Currently developing "Account Reconciliation" with one of the largest fintech companies around.
• Local to the SF Bay Area (where the position was).

Shortly after, I got an email from the scheduler saying, "Congratulations on being selected for an interview for the role of Lead Software Engineer." Three days before the interview, I got an automated email saying, "We regret to advise that at this time we won't be moving forward with your application for this particular role, however we will keep your details on file." When I reached out to the recruiter, he said that I was never in consideration for "Lead" and that the upcoming interview would be for "Sr. Software Engineer". I reluctantly agreed to go through with the interview.

On the day of the interview, the entire interview panel sat in on my very first round, which was a system design round where they asked me to design a popular non-software system. As they poked holes in my design, I evolved it to plug those holes. That question is a cliché "out of college" question which has nothing to do with software or distributed systems. Post-lunch, one of their senior engineers and a lead developer came in with a laptop, started HackerRank, selected a "Hard" difficulty level, and asked me to pick a problem of my choice. We read through the couple-paragraph-long problem statement together. I designed the algorithm to solve this all by myself in the next few minutes on the whiteboard. They, however, wanted to see it coded and all HackerRank tests passing. This exercise went a little slow since I was typing on an unfamiliar PC laptop, as I had been using a MacBook over the last few years. Also, HackerRank forces you to spend time on marshalling input and output data before you can attack the core of the problem. For the last round, I felt very rushed by other folks peeping inside the interview room and the interviewer checking the clock multiple times.

A couple of days went by, and then the recruiter called again, offering me a position of Software Engineer (not Senior or Lead). The compensation offered was $70K less than what I was already making. This was my first onsite after having decided to start job hunting, and the demeaning offer completely dented my confidence for a few weeks at least. It took me another couple of months to start getting offers that were more respectful of my experience and skill level. I debated with myself whether or not I should spend my time and attention writing this review. I would not have, but I did it anyway, hoping to save the time and effort of other engineers who are considering interviewing.

The interview included a question to design a system unrelated to software. There was also a hard problem on HackerRank to solve while the interviewer watched the typing.