Got a contact from a recruiter on LinkedIn, 1st exchanged with HR with positive feedback but received refused email the same day. Managers want someone with background experience, which is not written in the post when I receive it from the recruiter, the job description needs to be improved.

I first was approached on Linkedin and was invited to start interviewing for a Data Engineer position in Paris. In the first round (1h phone call), I talked with a recruiter about my prior experiences, what I’m looking for in my next job and my interest in the company and role. For that, I had to dig in their website to undestand their business model and to come up with interesting questions. In the second round (1h zoom meeting), I interviewed with the manager and the technical leader of the hiring team. It was more of a two way interview : they tried to understand what I’m currently working on, my side projects, what I’m interested in and explained the current and futur projects of the team, what they are looking for for this role. On the other hand, I got to ask them more questions about their business and some technical aspects (stack, vision). To prepare this round, I took the time to read/watch resources from their engineering blog/youtube talks. This helped me asking some engineering ortiented questions during the interview. After this interview, I got a take home exercise (implementing autocompletion using from-scratch data structures and algorithms and some follow-up questions on scalling). I tried as much as I could to submit a clean solution : well documented code, a readme file where I laid down my thoughts on building my solution and explained my choices for each part of it. After submitting, I got a call from the recruiter that informed me that we are moving to the last step. In the third round (2h zoom meeting), I talked with two team members. The interview consisted of : - 45min to review my submission where I had to explain some parts of it (code, design, choices) - 45min to work on a system design question related to the take home (how to scale my implementation) - The remaining time was more of a chat where I got to ask questions about the team, their work and what would be a good fit for this role. I got an offer the following week. Note : After each interview, I had a quick call with the recruiter where we had mutual feedbacks and where she set expectations for the next round. The process took a month and is well designed to help candidates prove themselves and filter on those who are willing to invest the time and energy. The interviewers were really friendly, and the HR members were helpful through the whole process. Quite honestly, one of my best experience interviewing in Paris, it was definitely worth the time spent.