I interviewed for the Engineering Manager - Pricing & Promotion role here. The experience was honestly frustrating. The recruiter sat in a phone booth the entire call, -- and I mean the entire call. Recruiter was greeting colleagues passing by with casual "hi" and "bye," making small guestures while I was trying to discuss a senior role. No notes. Nothing substantive. I am an EM myself, so I came prepared with detailed questions about this specific role: team structure, what the Pricing & Promotion team owns, strategic mandate, key problems they solve. Recruiter'S response? --- recruiter answered everything except my role. Just defaulted to: "We are hiring for all levels—senior directors, team members, everyone." Completely sidestepped specifics about the position I was interviewing for. When I pushed for clarity on team scope, responsibilities, or what success looks like in this role, recruiter deflected. Zero engagement. It felt like she didn't even read the job description. For a senior management role, you would expect basic prep. Got none. The whole thing felt transactional—rushed and hollow. (Could be Fake hiring, as seen in recent years!!!) Look, Flink might be great. But this hiring process doesn't reflect it. Would not recommend the interview experience here.

Flink approached me multiple times on Linkedin since the company started operating. However, until the last week, I never replied to their recruiter e-mails as it's not a company I wanted to work for. Last week, I wanted to give them a chance and accepted the interview invite. The recruiter interview was pretty standard, with no surprises. However, the hiring manager interview was the worst interview ever. We had a pretty standard soft-skill interview for an hour with the hiring manager (a Director). He asked typical questions such as evaluating team performance, providing feedback, etc. He also covered the expectations from an EM at Flink and so on. Nothing surprising. However, at the end of the interview, he said I might not be technical enough for this role and that I "may not be able to pass the technical round" even though he didn't talk about any technical topics during the interview. This assumption, of course, aroused my curiosity, and I wanted to know more about what made him think so since he reached that conclusion without asking any hard-skill questions. Then he says, "just looking at your CV". First, this is a very interesting thing to say during an interview and a very strange assumption. Very often, companies think the opposite about me and consider me very technical, looking at the fact I was a Principal Engineer before the EM role - second, if this is something he can understand by just looking at the CV, then why we wasted time by having the 2nd round of the interview. Very strange. Luckily, Flink was the smallest start-up I've been interviewing with, and I'm glad it didn't happen. Then I looked at the profile of the pretentious interviewer on Linkedin, and of course, it was the first time he was managing a platform team. Very typical. Flink goes to my "hard pass" bucket.