One of the worst interview experience faced so far. Interview process is standard - Screening round, followed by 3 technical rounds (technical ,coding, design) and finally HM round. Though my interview experience with the interviewers were good. But experience with HM was very bad. The Hiring Manager told me that things are positive and he was keen on offering me the job. He also told that because of some re-org things might be late. But after a week I got a rejection email saying the reason as Skill Mismatch. I thought that after screening the resume, and then talking about my experience in the screening round, giving this lame excuse was definitely not expected.

Oh man, red flags everywhere. My interview process consisted of two video conferences, each about an hour in length. Both were technical interviews. The first interview was with the SRE team's manager. I answered a handful of more general technical questions and then did a coding exercise where I coached the manager through writing some code and then benchmarking it. This was generally an enjoyable process, however, when I had a chance to ask more questions at the end of our session, I discovered this manager did not actually work for Couchbase. Instead, he worked for an external consultancy that was brought in to stand up the SRE team, was in the process of swapping out their consultants for direct hires, and that he would eventually hire someone to swap out for him as well. This felt odd to me. The strangest question from this interviewer was effectively something along the lines of "are you ready to work non-stop", which was really concerning, but I said I was still interested in learning more. The next interview was a mess to setup, because the manager changed the times last minute a couple times. He ultimately did not make the interview, but I did meet with two engineers from the current SRE team. This consisted of more broad technical / architectural discussions. I found out during this interview that neither of these individuals worked for Couchbase either! They were also from the external consultancy. Both individuals seemed somewhat unengaged and spoke negatively of Couchbase, saying the company didn't really know what it was doing with SRE and had multiple "false starts" with SRE initiative attempts. It was at the end of this interview I realized I was not interested in working for this company. The manager scheduled another touch base, but rescheduled multiple times, before finally sending a quick "I can't make this meeting today" email and having an automated rejection message sent to me. Good riddance. This was an incredibly disappointing process, and it's clear Couchbase's only mission is to get big and IPO. If you want to be a cog worked to the bone and pick up a potential IPO lottery ticket, go for it. If you want to be treated like a human being, I would highly advise passing this company up.