The last round interview with the CEO and the CEO were mediocre at best, and that was the overall takeaway for me.
First off, let me just say that the CEO was extremely unpleasant to interview with during the last round. I don't care if the CEO was busy with an important release or milestone. He had scheduled the time block to interview a candidate, and he was supposed to be there with full attention to properly judge a candidate. Too bad it wasn't the case at all. Instead, the CEO came in 5 minutes late to the interview, was not aware of the candidate he was interviewing and asked me to wait for him to pull up my profile; often paid attention to something else on his computer while he was talking, and stopped mid-sentences. Not only those, he also asked random questions that weren't really relevant to the company or the position and often didn't follow up with the candidate's response. The interview was also ended 7 minutes earlier than scheduled, leaving me with some outstanding questions that I wanted to ask. All of those, without a single apology from him for being late or having to constantly not focusing on the interview. It was just a waste of time for both the candidate and the interviewer.
There were a total of 7 rounds, and the first 6 rounds were an awesome experience. The interviewers were super friendly and supportive throughout the coding interviews; the CTO showed that he deeply cared about the wellbeing of his engineers rather than just making sure they keep grinding; and the recruiter was the best, as he was super prompt and communicative throughout the process. The recruiter tried his best to accommodate me as I requested for an expedited interview process.
Overall Interview Process
Rounds:
1st - Recruiter Screening
2nd - Online Assessment with Codility (3 questions, 1 E to M leetcode, 2 class implementations)
3rd - 1st technical video interview (1 M leetcode, with follow up questions for optimization)
4th - 2nd technical video interview (2 system design questions)
5th - interview with the Hiring Manager (general background discussion)
6th - interview with the CTO (general background discussion)
7th - interview with the CEO.
The process took 3 - 3.5 weeks for me. It's very interesting that these rounds were on different days, so there's no cramming of back2back interviews on any single day, which was refreshing.
