The interview process at CircleCI was disorganized, opaque, and frankly disrespectful of candidates’ time. After an initial chat with the recruiter, I was told the process would include this: a hiring manager round 60 mins, followed by team interviews with the data director 30 mins and engineering director 45 mins, and then a final round with the head of product 30 mins. However, the actual process was riddled with last-minute changes and unclear communication. After the hiring manager round, I was unexpectedly told an additional round had been added with a product design manager 30 mins in the team screening rounds—something not mentioned earlier. The new sequence was data director 30 mins, product desgin manager 30 mins and engineering director 45 mins. This interviewer seemed confused about the purpose of the interview, admitted they were informed at the last minute, and even said outright that they didn’t know why they were asked to be on the panel. The conversation felt awkward, disjointed, and completely unnecessary—which left a very poor impression. After the interview with the engineering director, when I asked her about the next steps—she had no idea. She suggested I reach out to the recruiter directly, which made it clear that interviewers weren’t aligned or even informed about the hiring process. When I reached out to the recruiter he said he will let me know in a day or two. Two days later, he told me I had made it to the final round—but, of course, they decided to add yet another round. This time, it was bizarrely, another conversation with the recruiter after the 30 mins conversation with the head of product and before an offer. At this point, the process was completely incoherent. They were clearly just adding steps as they went. He said I’d receive the scheduling email for the head of product round by the end of that week. That never happened. I waited. The week ended. Nothing. Nada. I followed up at the start of the next week, and the recruiter now said they were waiting for other candidates to catch up on team interviews—yet another vague delay in a process that was already all over the place. At this point I'm still waiting for that email, okay! And then—two days later—I got a generic rejection email. No explanation, no reasoning, no acknowledgment that they’d specifcally told me I was in the final round. Radio silence after that. No response when I contacted the recruiter after receiving that email. It was an absolutely chaotic experience—zero structure, zero accountability, and zero respect for the candidate’s time or effort. If this is how they run hiring, add steps as you go, keep candidates on hold because they feel like it, I can only imagine the chaos inside. If you're a candidate who values transparency, structure, and respect for your time, I would strongly recommend avoiding interviewing at CircleCI.

The interview process was... kind-of bizarre? I did an initial call with a recruiter, a call with the interim hiring manager, and five calls with folks around product, all over video. These were scheduled as one call, another call a couple weeks later, three calls a couple weeks after that, another call a couple weeks after that, another call a couple weeks after that. No one ever knew the hiring timeline. Several of the calls were very conversational! I wouldn't say that they went well or poorly--they just *were*. The people I talked with were nice, but I didn't learn much about the role, and they didn't ask many specific questions. The other half of the calls were very strange and off-putting, though. The interviewer would join the call, say, "I have a list of questions. There will be some time at the end for you to ask questions, too," and then just start reading out things from a doc they had in front of them: "Section 1, Question 1: What is your philosophy on [thing]?", "Section 1, Question 2: What can you tell me about market research?", "Section 2, Question 1: ...", etc. Several dozen one-off questions, over 40 straight minutes. They never asked a single practical question or gave me an exercise. There was no traditional "PM interview". There was no back-and-forth. They never even asked what I was looking for in my next position. They would mute themselves and type out seemingly everything I said. I'd try to ask a question, and they'd keep typing for another 5-10 seconds before unmuting, giving a non-answer, and then muting themselves again. One went out of their way to comment that my answers were unusually long and thorough. Another went out of their way to comment that my answers were remarkably short. They were asking many of the same questions, and I was answering them the same way both times. On at least one occasion, I asked a clarifying question, and the interviewer said that they didn't know either, because they hadn't written the question, but to just say something, because they needed to write something down. At least half of the interviewers also didn't bother to introduce themselves, tell me what they did at the company, or tell me how long they'd worked there. So, at the end of the call, with the three minutes we had left, I'd ask, "Who are you?" Many of them had not been at the company for very long, so when I asked questions about the org, they said, "I'm not sure!" and told me to ask someone else, but not who else, exactly. When I asked about the product team's priorities, they all gave conflicting answers. At the beginning of the process, I was told there were multiple product openings working on growth, customer-facing features, and internal infrastructure. I asked multiple times what kind of product role I was supposed to be interviewing for--all require different skills, and some of them would be such a non-match that I really wouldn't have bothered!--but none of my interviewers seemed to know. It was a good round of practice interviews, and I met a couple of nice people-the recruiters in particular were genuinely wonderful, and I hope to work with them someday. But it seems like the company has had some recent departures alongside org growth, so people around the product department implicitly disagree on what they need, no one is taking responsibility for establishing consensus or filling those organizational gaps in the meantime, and some people are hoping to climb the corporate ladder?