The process gives you a great overview of how the company works and its culture and ensures a good alignment between the candidate and the company. Also, duckDuckGo pays for all homework projects, which gives you confidence that the company takes recruitment seriously and tries to find and retain talented people. 1. Short initial interview with a recruiter, focused on knowing the recruitment process and the role expectations, and an initial introduction to the company culture. 2. A paid test project to be done within a week (8 hours of work). This project is focused on demonstrating project management abilities and cultural fit. 3. Interview for around one hour and a half with different team members. Discuss the project delivered, career trajectory, and company values alignment. 4. Technical design of a solution. This test is paid and must be done within a week (8h of work aprox.) 5. Implementation of the previous technical design applying certain constraints. This test is paid and must be delivered within two weeks (16h aprox.) 6. Interview with the CTO. 7. Job offer.

The take home assignment process they follow is brilliant for ensuring that you are actually evaluated objectively. A blind panel reviews your submission against a fixed rubric to give you a score without knowing your race, gender, or status. The only problem is, the question they give you for the assignment is so broad it's difficult to come up with a good answer. In the case of the Site Reliability position, being asked to improve the "search experience" is difficult. Many of the ideas I had were software development, marketing, or product related decisions. From the SRE perspective, the experience is only improved by improving reliability, and DDG seems to be quite reliable from the outside.