The hiring process here is a complete waste of time. Four rounds: HR screening, chat with the Head of Engineering, a take-home assignment, and a presentation.
The first two rounds are basically the same thing — they just ask about your background and what you’ve done, then tell you a bit about the company. Nothing new, nothing different, just repeating themselves. It could’ve been one quick online call, but instead they drag you back for another pointless round.
The take-home assignment is “simple” in the sense that it doesn’t test anything deep, but it eats up hours of your time. It’s not about skill, it’s about how much free time you’re willing to waste. I did it properly even though my tech stack wasn’t exactly what they wanted and I believe I'm the most dedicated candidate after spent hours to work on the assignment and hours to practice to presentation, I've even lose my voice after the final round.
The presentation was okay, but then they started throwing in ridiculously trivial, nit-picky questions about their specific stack. Stuff that nobody in their right mind would memorize unless they lived and breathed NodeJS, React, NextJS, Apollo, GraphQL, Elasticsearch, Python, or Go every single day.
And after all of that — after I put in hours of work, took days off to go to their office, and even followed up multiple times — they just ghosted me. No feedback, no rejection, nothing. If that’s how they treat candidates, it says everything about how they value people. Maybe that's why this company has been around for over a decate but still being considered as a startup.
My advice: if your background isn’t in their exact stack, don’t even bother. They’ll happily waste your time, squeeze free work out of you, and then disappear.