Staff Software Engineer, Infrastructure Interview Experience

I applied on the careers site with no referral, and the recruiter was in my inbox quickly, so the whole process started fast. The loop was a 15-minute recruiter call, then a phone design round, then a five-round onsite with system design, coding, project deep dive, behavioral, and a separate culture round. Everybody was responsive and genuinely nice, and the process felt way more efficient than most big tech loops, but the bar also felt extremely high. The AI-looking technical questions were mostly normal infra questions if I abstracted them correctly, but the coding round blindsided me because it was a practical project exercise, not the multithreaded coding problem I had prepared for. I came out feeling good about everything except coding, and I ended up rejected with zero feedback.

I applied on the careers site with no referral, and the recruiter was in my inbox quickly, so the whole process started fast. The loop was a 15-minute recruiter call, then a phone design round, then a five-round onsite with system design, coding, project deep dive, behavioral, and a separate culture round. Everybody was responsive and genuinely nice, and the process felt way more efficient than most big tech loops, but the bar also felt extremely high. The AI-looking technical questions were mostly normal infra questions if I abstracted them correctly, but the coding round blindsided me because it was a practical project exercise, not the multithreaded coding problem I had prepared for. I came out feeling good about everything except coding, and I ended up rejected with zero feedback.