Started with a recruiter round where the recruiter basically asked hiring manager style questions and was extremely verbose. Then had a hiring manager round with someone who seemed very new to the company and didn’t appear to have a strong understanding of the org or technical direction.
The system design round with the founding engineer was surprisingly easy. I made a few mistakes, but it didn’t seem like the interviewer fully understood some of the concepts either, so the discussion stayed fairly surface level.
The onsite was heavily behavioral and honestly had a lot of high ego energy throughout the panel. Also found it unusual that both a design person and a product person were deeply involved in the interview process, which gave the impression that either they don’t fully trust their engineering team to evaluate candidates or they rely too much on adjacent functions during hiring.
Overall, the process felt disorganized and not a great use of time.
