Started with a 30-minute conversation with the hiring manager. He was amazing, very friendly, and the questions were mostly resume-based. The next round was a 1-hr TPS interview with an engineering manager. It was a HackerRank-style question (not typical LeetCode), but practicing LeetCode definitely helped in choosing the right data structures. After that, I had a conversation with the recruiter to discuss salary, location, next steps, etc. The interview loop consisted of 5 rounds: 30 mins: Culture fit (behavioral questions), 45 mins: PM interview (behavioral, focused on collaboration with PMs), 45 mins: Debugging round (debugging a working system - fairly easy), 1 hour: System design (medium to hard), 45 mins: AI-assisted coding round Overall, all the interviewers were great to interact with and very supportive throughout the process. The AI-assisted round was similar to debugging, but they expected me to “vibe-code” using AI to identify issues and fix bugs or add features. After clearing these rounds, the final steps included an office visit and a 15-minute call with a CXO.

So the interview process involved 7 interviews and it would’ve been 8 (excluding office tour and recruiter calls) if they went through with the last round but the recruiter had a slick way of saying it’s 4 rounds with the 3rd being a loop of 5 interviews. The first interview is with a hiring manager call which went well. Then there was a live coding round where they asked me to build a battleship game which was pretty average in terms of difficulty. Then we went into the loop round with an orange cloud interview(behavioural), debugging, system design, product manager and another hiring manager interview where there was an AI coding challenge where you use prompts to fix bugs in a project or an environment that you’re not familiar with (which they didn’t mention earlier). After the loop round they tell me that the team feedback was positive so they will select me for a final call which will be with one of the two cofounders or senior executives. Before setting that call up they invited me for an Austin office tour which went great too. Then I get a call from the recruiter saying that the company is evolving so they are doing an exercise to re-evaluate the roles to see which to keep and which to cancel and this exercise would take a minimum of 2 weeks. After 3 weeks, the recruiter comes back and says “after reevaluating the role, the team went in a different direction for the role”. A TOTAL waste of time. The interviewers were actually nice and friendly and the recruiter was pretty responsive too but it looks to me like it’s a leadership decision but why waste people’s time and do the interviews before doing the exercises or reevaluations.