Applied through Gitlab careers page. First round was a 30min screening call with recruiter. Second round was a 90min Backend technical interview round. Was given a MR prior to the interview. Added review comments before the call and made improvements to the MR during the call. I was communicating my approach through-out the interview. Interviewer too interacted throughout the call. Third round was a 90min Frontend technical. Was given an MR similar to the second round. The MR needed improvements in Vue, html and css. I presented the list of improvements that can be made and prioritised them. I asked interviewer if he was okay with it. He nodded and asked me to continue. The interviewer stayed silent through out the interview. But I continued thinking out loud while I was making changes to the MR. During the interview I also mentioned that there were few changes which would take more time like refactoring the html file and css files. The interviewer again nodded and asked me to continue. By the end of the call I improved MR by 95% and had a working MR. The interview seemed happy and told that the round went well. After few days I got a call from recruiter saying I cleared the Backend round but not the frontend round. I was taken a back as I thought I did well based on the interviewer’s interaction at the end of the call. I wish the FE interviewer was more interactive. Based on my FE interview experience, I would recommend gitlab to conduct panel interviews for technical rounds for more transparency and fairness.

I applied via their jobs board and got an automated reply immediately and my first scheduled interview within a week. The full process for a full-stack engineer is 5 interviews: basic screening by a recruiter, behavioral & work history interview with the hiring manager for the prospective team, backend technical skills interview, front-end technical skills interview, & departmental (stage) director interview with more how you think & how you work type questions. After all of the interviews there is a background check and professional references check which takes about a week. Finally comes the job offer verbally followed by an official contract to sign.