Applied for an Engineering Manager role at their Warsaw branch. Had a short call with the recruiter, who was friendly and professional. Then I was interviewed by the hiring manager, who was also an engineering manager. The HM was friendly but relatively inexperienced. He didn't know what questions to ask, only talked for 10 min and let me ask the questions for the rest of the interview. I asked many questions and felt like I was interviewing him. And the interview ended early. The reporting line would be I, as an EM, report to him, also an EM, then he reports to a senior EM, which seemed like a major red flag. As for the next stage, the HM told me it would be a "system design interview", whereas the recruiter told me it would be an "API design interview". So I thought it was gonna be designing an API service. But no, it turns out it to be a complete waste of time. This design interview was conducted by a staff engineer. In the first half, he asked me a lot of leadership questions, which seemed a bit strange to be questioned by someone with no leadership experience. Can't they spare a senior engineering manager for such an interview? In the second half, he asked me to write some API endpoints in a google document... We spent an hour writing endpoint URLs and request and response payloads for a simple use case. There was no system design or anything related to the architecture. He was also reluctant to clarify my questions and just wanted me to type JSON in the google document and paying attention to small details. I seriously doubt how he will be able to judge if I'm a good engineering manager or not just by looking at this pointless exercise. There were no questions about scalability, observability, architecture, best practices, etc. Just API URLs and payloads. It seemed like an interview question for a junior developer. What a waste of time. The next day, I received a generic rejection email from the recruiter with no feedback. Overall, my impression of Bolt is that they are still a very young company and still trying to figure out how to do basic things. The result of the application seems pretty arbituary depending on the interviewer.
