I was contacted by one of their sourcer after applying. Initial mail contained some basic questions and the process. After confirming, I was sent a Hackerrank test invite - should have been a red flag for a Principal Engineer role, even before a call with recruiter. After this, a technical phone screen was scheduled which was a live coding test. Finally, I received a call from the recruiter and she mentioned a bit about the process and asked me about my current salary and expectation. A bit premature in my opinion, the salary range quoted was a standard Senior SWE salary in Bangalore, much lower than Principal / Staff Engineer salary. Anyway, I was interested to talk to the people as I heard nice things about the company and the culture. I had 5 rounds of interviews schedule over two days via zoom. I enjoyed my conversations with 4 out of 5 interviewers. I was surprised to meet an Engineering manager in my only coding round. It was quite clear that person was not at all experienced about coding interviews and how to gauge signals from a senior candidate. I was asked a leetcode type of question that required graph. I described the solution and then set out to code. After finishing the methods, I was told to run it on coderpad. This came as a surprise, especially 35 minutes into the interview. CS Engineers will know that it takes a bit of time and boilerplating to make a running code for graph problems with input and none of this was prepared by the interviewer. I spent another 10-12 minutes just to piece together a code that can be run and the allotted 45 minutes was over so interviewer stopped me. Anyway, it has been 3 weeks and not a peep from the recruiter. Seeing as how inflated title the Principal Engineer is and the low compensation, I didn't really bother following up again. For others' reference, at Twilio the Principal Engineer maps to a standard L5 engineer in the industry with a little less pay and I'd guess Staff maps to L4.

Total interview process is a mess. They schedule interview with panel members who don't have enough knowledge or experience to assess candidate in the right way. 1. Round1 is a coding round. Very basic DS Algo questions on strings. Some 4-5 lines of code presented and asked above share review feedback. (Rejected for no valid reason and no feedback shared). 2. Round1 again done to screen. Architecture and design questions. Although it appears everything went really good, the result is not expected. (Rejected for no valid reason and no feedback shared. Automated mail received - At this point no feedback would be provided :)