The recruiter reached out to me over the phone and asked if I was interested for the role of IC since I am an Engineering Manager at present. I was absolutely fine since the role was purely technical and something I wanted to pursue. After 2 technical rounds of an hour each and 2 managerial rounds of 45mins each, there was an HR round where the HR was hell-bent on establishing his point that I am new to the domain. I asked a nominal 25% raise from the current CTC. After this, the HR, someone who was talking normally, just replied "will get back to you" and ended the meeting without a proper thank-you. The next day the recruiter reached out and gave the numbers which were lesser than my current pay. Note: The expected CTC was well under the market standards by at least 15%. Declining the offer politely is the best thing I could do.

Two interviews. One technical, one behavioral. Simple process. Questions focus on the ability to test you write clean code and able to identify what are correct patterns, best practices, identify the errors in the small snippets of code etc..