The interview process had several stages:
Initial HR screening: set up via email, then a short phone call. Straightforward but very high-level. Communication from HR throughout the process was punctual, though often minimal and sometimes not addressing direct questions.
Hiring Manager call: this was a very positive conversation. Good feeling overall. I was asked some technical questions about how a browser works (request flow, load balancers, etc.), nothing too deep but a good discussion.
Panel interview: with two team members. I walked through my experiences and answered a few technical questions (VPC, Security Groups, Kubernetes cluster configuration). The conversation was engaging and they seemed genuinely happy with my answers and background.
System design interview: this was the most technical stage. I was asked to design a platform to manage access requests to OCP clusters from SRE teams. I completed the design and the interviewer gave me very positive feedback and compliments on my reasoning and approach.
Unfortunately, even with overall positive feedback, I was not selected. The reason given was that another candidate had stronger Azure skills. This felt inconsistent, since the team themselves had explained the role was focused on OCP on AWS, which is where I’m strongest (and this was confirmed during the panel).
Overall impression:
The process itself was structured and the technical conversations were fair and constructive. The experience with the team was very positive. The HR experience was less so, communication was mostly limited to short emails, with little constructive feedback despite the time investment.
In the rejection email, they did share another relevant open position, but it seems it would require going through the entire process again.