The interview itself was pretty decent and consisted of 5 stages: (1) initial application, (2) an hour long intro chat, (3) an hour long coding interview, (4) two hours long system design interview, and (5) another hour long interview with a VP of engineering. I thouroughly enjoyed meeting everyone from Pactum during this interview process. However, it all felt like a complete waste of time once the offer came through. It was considerably lower than my current compensation at that time and they didn't budge on the offer stating that they cannot afford it being a startup. Their application form includes "expected compensation" field and they asked about it during the (2) stage of the interview, and I was very open about it. At no point they indicated that they wouldn't be able to come even close to my expectations, let alone exceed them. I wish Pactum to be more considerate about their applicants' time and verify very early in the process whether they can meet someone's expectations.

Don't waste your time and confidence for this company unless you are desperate to find any IT job. The process will take long 5 steps which will start easy and end up with worthless waste of time. 1. Screening - its okay. 2. Online coding - 3 simple tasks about orginising/retrieving/printing some messages, last one little harder as it includes recursion for chats tree(main branch, replies,replies to replies etc.) 3. Talk with manager - Normal talk about your experience and expectations. Its all good 4. 3 Hours of technical interview at their office which they call "System Design" which will start as "System Design" and end up with questioning any random topics. They will give you one paper with vague description of their platform: Supliers, Companies, platform,message. You will need to design system for it. At start it may go okay but then they will ask more and more questions about topics which you actually dont do in daily work as engineer. They are questions(partially theoretic) which has actually very easy answers and can be found in 5 second googling but if you are not a robot you may not remember them. Then they will ask about testing and observability. For application for a low salary job they will treat meeting as they are interviewing for 6K Brutto salary Software Architect or some Devops and questions will go far from Software Engineering.(Of course, they need to somehow full the 3 hours of talk). Questions really can be different, starting from what salt is used for in password hashing, why objects are faster than arrays, how works load balancing, what Redux used for, how to optimise SQL query etc, how many tests and what kind of tests you need for different codebases etc. The main point is, it doesnt matter for how many questions you will answer right. It easily may end up with "we decided to move with another candidate" and they wont give you a proper comprehencive feedback on which questions you were wrong. They will just send you something like "you dont have enough experience for high level systems" like they are hiring for System Architect or something else. And dont pay attention to their note about how they are aware of "imposter syndrome". In reality the way how they will treat you might be a very "good" reason to fall into that syndrome.