Process started with a phone screen with a founding engineer - excellent communicator and a good listener, overall both of us thought this would be a good match. I was invited onsite.
Onsite started with a great first round with one of the senior engineers, revolved around my experience and a coding problem. Respecting the NDA, cannot give details but problem was LC hard, my interviewer worked with me on this and understood my approach. Good experience.
The things went south from the next interview, with another founding engineer, who is the "data guy". I was asked questions in the context of my area of expertise, but while answering, every answer turned out to be wrong, I was constantly interrupted and was changing course every minute. Apparently this interviewer wanted me to discuss how much data will be collected versus the actual security problem I was answering. Facepalm honestly. I explained I was answering your original question which was around security. More questions around the product I worked on, but assuming my product works the same way as he thinks. Thus my answers were again wrong, constant interruptions. When I realized he wanted to discuss something that hasn't been what I worked on, it was again too late. Basically projecting his own understanding on how our product should have been in his own experience. I explicitly stated a couple of times that this is not what we do currently with our product and may not be a good topic to dig into. I can take a stab at how we could solve such a problem but that would be more of brainstorming. At this point, my resume was pulled out and read line by line to tell me what I worked on is an internal project, which I explained, is not. After this, I kinda gave up, knowing it will not end well anyways. Rest 20 minutes with this person were his self appraisal around how much experience he has with data, how new big data tech / map reduce etc. is farce. How containerization is nothing new but been for 20 years. How he thinks kubernetes is all hype. Honestly a lot of self praise and ego massage lol. In the end I asked if he liked any of the new technologies and what he liked about them, just to understand what his attitude towards change is. Answers were again pretty much same as earlier, all k8s, containers, big data, map reduce is for startups... seriously, I wanted to hear one good word of praise. Again a few claims of 20 years in data field, complex data manipulation and etc etc. My take on this was, some see glass half empty, no point putting efforts. I gave up, hoping next guy knocks on the door.
This point onwards, I kinda knew I am not making through. But rest of the interviewers were some of the most pleasant ones. I talked to one person who focussed on purely problem solving and coding. Typical leetcode stuff here. He seemed to be a younger but smarter and polite guy. This round went very well.
Last round was with another backend engineer. He was also senior but one of the most pleasant interviewers I have ever met. He was recent hire. He made me comfortable and discussed questions that made sense. No bragging. No digging into areas that I was not comfortable with. There were few SQL questions, which I am not experienced with, but he quickly switched to a more aligned topic that we both discussed. I didn't do well honestly in this round, with a coding / problem solving question. But I got pretty good support from my interviewer.
Overall, except the unnecessarily stressful data round, rest of my experience was pleasant. I wasn't too much hopeful, but also not too disappointed obviously. This is a great company otherwise and I think they are already doing well. Location wise also, this would work well for south bay folks.
