Tell me about a client-facing experience.

"This was a really quick process for me: recruiter chat, two technical phone screens, then four final-round interviews. The early rounds covered broad web-dev fundamentals, debugging, and a small API-to-UI coding task that later got expanded in the onsite. The final loop felt more performative than most because there was clearly a hidden rubric beyond just solving the prompt, especially around communication, customer instincts, and how I use AI while coding. The coding round explicitly allowed AI, but they seemed to care much more about whether I could break work down, steer the model, and review it critically than whether I could one-shot a solution. The behavioral side also cared a lot about why Stripe and whether I really wanted a customer-facing role like this."

"I got an offer for Databricks FDE, and the loop felt very structured but also pretty different from a normal SWE interview. Mine was fully remote, and the stages were recruiter, a rapid-fire technical screen, a separate practical coding round, a decomp round, and then leadership. The coding itself was not absurd LeetCode, which I appreciated. The most important round was decomp, where I had to treat the interviewer almost like a client and clarify stakeholder, scope, and KPI before touching architecture. The whole process felt like they were testing whether I could own an end-to-end enterprise solution fast."