No HR presence at all in any stage. In the second round, the interviewer casually mentioned that many candidates simply drop from the call when he asks them questions. Before my interview I was explicitly told this would be a conversational round, but was then asked to open an IDE on my machine and write code with no warning. There was no engineering code-pair discussion as you'd expect in a real SWE interview - it felt designed to catch candidates off guard rather than assess logic and collaboration skills. I understand this is a startup and things move fast, but the interview process will feel very off-base to anyone accustomed to professional hiring practices. If many candidates are dropping from calls with the same interviewer at the same company, perhaps it's a signal that something in the current process isn't working.