The initial recruiter call was informative and the two technical interviews were fairly comfortable. The first technical interview with a Principal Engineer was very domain-specific, testing for hands-on experience with React through a "real-world" exercise that was pretty pleasant to work with. The second technical interview with a Team Lead was supposed to be centred around the topic of "system design", but to be fair, it only covered one single system design question in under 5 minutes, which seemed a bit too rushed. The conversation with the Tech Lead was good anyway, despite of the diminished emphasis on system design. Overall, everybody at Elastic who I talked to was very friendly and neither of the interviews required any of the standard "LeetCode interview prep". However, the system design interview lacked sufficient depth and could be explored more thoroughly to allow building a more productive conversation. I would certainly interview with Elastic again in the future, as the technical challenges are quite exciting and the organization offers plenty of career growth opportunities through its career ladder matrix.

I applied online and a recruiter contacted me by email a couple of days later. The interview process was as follows: 1. Introductory video call with the recruiter 2. Automated online assessment (about 10 questions, one of them a simple coding problem, the others general web development questions) 3. Interview with the hiring manager. Mostly non-technical with "tell me about a time you did X" type questions. 4. One hour coding video interview. 40 minutes dedicated to solving a leetcode type problem (didn't expect this for a principal level position, to be honest) and 20 minutes for me asking questions. This interview was extremely rushed. 5. One hour systems design video interview. They asked me to prepare a 10 minute presentation about a past project in which I had a leadership role, 30 minutes dedicated to a design exercise for which they provided background information in advance, and 20 minutes for free-form Q&A. 6. Offer