I applied for the Senior Software Engineer position. The process was clear from the beginning, although it was not really fast. Everyone was nice and I even received access to their Slack channel to meet other employees. I got until the last interview, where I implemented a project and defended in front of a couple of engineers. In general, the process was fine but I got the image that they are pushing too hard with their criteria of their ideal candidate. It does not matter if the project works perfectly, is performant or well documented. Just a simple answer during the last interview can ruin the whole process. From my eyes, this was unfair because I could demonstrate with my career experience and open source projects that their opinion may be wrong. However, they just send you an email with the reason why they discarded you and there is no way to demonstrate the opposite. My feeling considering that this position is open for a really long time, plus a similar experience of a couple of really good engineers that I personally know, is that they are looking for a rockstar or someone out of everyone's league. And sincerely, I am not 100% sure if anyone with those skills would not better go straight to the top IT companies instead of applying for this position. After all that I just said and because you get paid for all the effort, I would say that the experience was positive.

First, the recruiter was contacted. Then I was given a tech task to complete within a week. Also, I joined their slack channel which was an interesting experience. Then we had a task review and Q&A. I was more than sure that I have succeded the interview but after 4 days I got the rejection email :D and when I asked to set up a meeting to understand the reason. To tell the truth, there was no reason. So the only reason can be that I asked for more than the base salary range. I didn't expect this kind of experience from Hotjar. Then I rated 0 and left my email but nobody from Hotjar contacted to me. DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME.