In short: run away!
3 round interview.
First round was with their recruiter. Went well, just the basics about the company, your background, etc.
Round two was with the CEO. He was nearly 10 minutes late. Talked a lot. Didn't really get technical. Said a lot of the things a potential employee would want to hear. Overall went well.
Round three was with their one and only infrastructure engineer. At least 10 minutes late. Questions weren't really technical, and seemed a bit dated to me. Got the impression they were sitting on a pile of technical debt and had too much work to handle. Just laughed when I asked about work-life balance. Seemed hesitant to consider modern tooling like docker and kubernetes. Overall went well, though.
Later on, I learned a few things through follow-up questions and my own research:
- All of their VPCs are currently managed by hand!
- Did not sound like they were even using load balancers
- State of the art FTP....
- Far too willing to increase pay/compensation, as well as some other oddities I noticed during the process - came off as desparate
- Still running traditional config management, even in the cloud - who knows how many errors that is introducing!
- They've had a lot of turnover, due to issues with the CEO, which the other reviews touched more on
- Everything the other reviewers said about the company and, specifically, the CEO, were confirmed by my research
- There are some serious cultural issues, with words not backed by action
- The whole architecture was described as a sinking ship
I really hope those that were just hired on make out well enough, or are smart enough to get out before it's too late.