Great initial chat with the recruiter and - from the description - a well thought out process that - from experience - is showing teething problems. Process starts with a take home assignment, to paraphrase the recruiter 'just a really messy terraform file that badly needs refactoring'. They're a small startup that have found a wonderful product market fit and is growing rapidly. I offered 20 years of industry experience including finance (PCI-DSS and SOX compliance), over a decade of building and managing infrastructure at startups turning unicorns, operating at Internet scale, using all the tech mentioned in the job ad, established in distributed teams and with remote work. It felt a great match and that I'd hit the ground running. Application was rejected though, reviewers raised concerns regarding 'design choices', 'ease of use' and 'difficulty of following multiple abstractions and layers of indirection'. All that found in couple hundred lines worth of terraform manifests, code which was suppose to serve as a basis for a technical discussion with the engineers. For a moment I thought they were joking ;) I'm assuming this to be a complete misunderstanding. If you decide to apply do ensure good understanding and alignment in regard to where you're coming from, their needs and your career goals. Godspeed!.. :)

Best recruitment process! The overall process was very smooth, and it had three different main stages: 1) It all started with an interview with the recruiter where I had the chance to better understand what company works on, and where I talked about my professional experience. The recruiter was very kind and she made me feel comfortable right away. 2) I was given a technical exercise to solve without any deadline. As soon as I delivered it, I was contacted back within less than 5 days, which matched the expectation was given to me in the first interview. 3) Final interview, a few days after, was split into 3 parts with 3 different persons: 3.1) Quick Presentation, about the company stack and infrastructure. And a discussion about the exercise, to explain the approach to solve it. 3.2) Technical questions 3.3) Live debugging of a issue. It was presented a scenario in which there was a failure, and I had to perform and justify what were the steps I used to solve it I have to highlight that all the interviewers were very nice. Specially the recruiter that was always available to clarify anything I asked her, and she cared by scheduling quick call between stages.