The initial communication was professional and the technical stack looked interesting. However, after the initial call, I received a technical assignment that was far beyond any reasonable industry standard. The task was to design and implement a production-ready logging infrastructure (alternative to CloudWatch) capable of handling 5TB of data per day across ECS, EC2, and Kubernetes. Based on the requirements for scalability, custom tagging, and UI/CLI access, I estimated the effort at ~25 hours of deep architectural and implementation work. Asking a candidate for nearly a full work week of unpaid labor on a specific production-scale problem feels more like free consulting than a skills assessment. I decided to withdraw from the process at this stage.