Their interview process was far too lazy for a senior engineering position. Going into it, I told the HR recruiter that I would prefer to not interview with them if they mostly used leetcode questions, and they assured me that they used real world coding examples, but this was not the case.
The first round of interviews was with management and we talked about senior leadership skills. They ended it with a frustrating leetcode question about fixing a hangman game. I tried to ask a few questions like "what does the code do?" "What problem are you trying to fix?" But they told me that was what I needed to figure out, so I fixed the code within the ten minute limit that they gave me. Afterwards they told me I didn't ask enough questions or collaborate with them while solving it, but I'm really not sure what other questions I could have asked. Plus, the solution was quite simple for a senior level engineer and not something that needed collaboration.
The next round was with engineers. I could tell going into this one that the engineers here weren't very qualified and didn't know what to ask. They had absolutely no interest in discussing my 10+ years of experience, and instead used up far too much time asking random questions about how to fix billing problems in AWS. I gave them the answers, but it was clear that they didn't actually know the correct answers and were just looking for free advice. A lot of their questions demonstrated that there were a lot of process issues here that were going to be a nightmare as they scaled, and they didn't seem to want to accept the industry accepted standards. They also didn't know the limits of their own SOC II audit, so when I explained how I'd split data in a database based on the end users they acted as if this was the wrong answer, when it's actually a security requirement of their own audit.
Most of the interview was another leetcode question about fixing a sudoku game, and again, the logic puzzle didn't use any coding that you'd normally use at work. Personally I code on a daily basis and have for over 10 years, so I never work on leetcode puzzles because I have plenty of real world puzzles to fix. With this one they wanted me to process data based on the position of a number in a string, but realistically if I was parsing something like customer IP addresses or logs, I would use a database instead.
Neither of the leetcode puzzles used any sort of logic that I've used at work. It seemed odd that across both interviews they couldn't come up with a single work related coding question, such as how to process data coming from SQL or fixing monitoring errors, and the two interviews were very redundant. Their interview process just seemed to be aimed at finding people who play leetcode all day, which is really lazy for a senior level position. This would be a very easy interview to get past if you used AI during it, or just googled the answer while they're talking.
They turned me down for the position as they felt I didn't have enough coding skills, but they did a very poor job of giving me space to show off any of my skills or experience. Typically, I'm the strongest coder on the team by a long shot. I have no interest in interviewing with them again because they seem to lack senior engineers who are willing to put some effort into their interview process.
