I went through 2 interviews for the SRE position. The first time I had applied, and never received back from anyone. At the time the handbook said that you would hear back from someone after 5 days. On day 6, I emailed someone I knew there. He did something and I got an email from a recruiter with some questions to answer. I answered them and sent them off. I received a rejection email after 1.5 months of waiting (and bugging). I feel that this rejection was fair, I rushed my answers to the questions and didn’t represent myself well. I do believe that GitLab didn’t get back to me soon enough, and I feel that their interview process needs work. The second time I applied I really gave it my all. I restructured my CV and sent it off. After some time I had a call with a recruiter, followed by a call with a hiring manager. Both of these people were very new to the company, and I believe didn’t follow the process as outlined in the handbook. I did ask that they not consider my previous application as I had rushed it and it did not represent me correctly. I soon received a rejection email. When I asked for details, it turns out that I was rejected based on my previous application, and based on lack of experience at scale (even though we didn’t discuss scale at all in any of the interviews). Personally, I do believe that I wasn’t given a fair chance. I was also lead to believe that GitLab prefers to hire people involved with their community. I have been part of the GitLab community for a while, I have: - Organised a meetup for them - Contributed code to gitlab-ce - Contributed to their handbook and various other pieces of documentation - Blogged about features - Used their product for quite some time. But none of this seems to have counted in my favour, nor was is considered at all. I do fear that the company is growing quickly and the new people aren’t living up to what I would expect from a GitLab employee. I hope I’m completely wrong and do wish them the best for the future.

First recruiter screening then a technical interview then you talk to the engineering manager and you get another technical interview with a take home assessment and finally a senior engineering manager interview