Pretty normal interview process. Started with a zoom recruiter interview then online coding test (multiple choice plus coding) followed by hiring manager interview, at least another round (cultural plus maybe system design?), and final interview with CTO.

Interview process was disappointing and poorly designed. I applied through the company website and was contacted by an HR representative shortly after. We scheduled an initial call, during which I shared details about my background and experience. The conversation went well, and I was invited to the next stage — an online assessment. Unfortunately, this is where things went downhill. The company uses a testing platform that requests access to your webcam and monitors your browser tab activity. If you're familiar with how JavaScript hooks work, you know this kind of monitoring can easily be bypassed — though I didn’t attempt to do so. I was curious to see how it would play out, as this was my first time encountering such an approach. The test itself was underwhelming. Most questions involved reading through overly complex and intentionally obfuscated code — nested decorators, lambda functions, and other tricks designed to make the code as unreadable as possible. You’re then asked to pick one of four possible outputs. It felt more like a guessing game than an actual skill assessment. One of the final questions was a simple LeetCode-style problem, but with an arbitrary restriction like “do not use sorting,” which didn’t add value — it just narrowed down valid solutions without real-world relevance. Overall, the test wasn’t difficult, but the methods used to increase its “challenge” came off as contrived and frustrating. It didn’t measure real engineering ability; it measured how often you write code as short as possible — a practice that would be unacceptable in any production environment. If this is how the company designs its interview process, it doesn’t inspire confidence in how they approach engineering or talent. It completely turned me off from moving forward.