The first interview was a one-hour coding session in a large repo. I’d recommend using a large monitor because the setup has four different panels open at once: the IDE, preview, instructions/explanation, and command line. The task itself was fairly manageable. However, communication afterward was slow. I did not hear back from the recruiter, so I followed up after a week and only then learned that I had passed. The second interview was scheduled three weeks later, so by that point I was already about a month into the process. This interview focused on implementing pagination. There were two interviewers, and they were great. They were easy to talk to, polite, and professional. That said, the task was demanding for a one-hour interview. I was expected to quickly understand a codebase I had never worked with, implement new functionality, and fix bugs in an unfamiliar environment, all while two people were watching. I do not necessarily blame them. Maybe they are looking for candidates who can move extremely quickly in that kind of setting. I was not able to complete the full pagination implementation within the hour. After the interview, communication was again an issue. I did not hear anything for a week, so I emailed the recruiter and did not get a response. About 3 days later, I received a rejection. So whole process took 6 weeks. Overall, I would say the technical interview experience itself was better than typical FAANG-style LeetCode interviews. The tasks were closer to real work, which I appreciated. However, the process still seemed to favor speed, pattern recognition, familiarity with the exact tech stack, and a bit of luck.

The entire process took about a month. There was an initial recruiter screen, then a take-home assessment, then a meeting with two engineers to go over that assessment as well as some more live coding. I then had a 30 minute meeting with the CEO, which seemed to go well. Other reviews mentioned that he seemed distracted or uninterested during the interview, but I personally did not experience that. I was then flown to their Redwood City office for a final onsite 2 hour interview where we had a getting-to-know-you chat and then dove into critiquing a design and asking questions as if I were the person leading the implementation of it. Then I was asked to implement a part of it as a final test. I did end up completing the exercise. I waited about a week, and ended up not getting an offer. Overall, it was a decent experience. I never felt anything negative up until the very end when all I got was a boilerplate email that I didn't get the job. I mistakenly thought I did well on the final interview, it's often hard to read how you're doing in the moment. I asked the recruiter if there was any other feedback on my performance, considering the overall time and effort I spent on the entire process, but never got a reply. I understand behavior is pretty standard for the industry, but that doesn't mean you have to do it that way. Now I'll never know why, and I can't glean any learnings from spending all that time.