The interview process was a joke. First of all, I applied for the Engineering Manager position, however, HR started interviewing me for the Principal Engineer position. I only noticed this at the end of the first interview. Apparently, they don't read applications or CVs well. Anyway, I was invited to the technical interview for the Engineering Manager position afterwards. I supposed to do the interview with two people from the company. An engineer, and a Director. However, the Director didn't show up, so I was alone with an engineer who recently got promoted to the squad-lead position. That was quite disappointing because 1) one-man interviews are usually problematic since you can't rely on a single person judgment 2) you would expect someone with a higher title in the room, especially for management positions and it was missing without no prior notice. Unfortunately, the interviewer wasn't enough experienced and he gave a negative impression to me about the company. For example, when he mentioned "some EMs are more technical, some aren't", I asked how roles don't conflict with the Principal title. His answer was "we only have 1 principal, we are also still learning about this title" etc. The whole interview was kind of an infrastructure oriented system design talk, that one can hardly correlate to a people-management position. At the end of the interview, there were only 3 minutes for my questions because the interviewer stuck with event-driven architecture questions. So it turns out HelloFresh has a huge PHP legacy with no clear architectural pattern. They have been migrating to GoLang but they don't seem to have a structured plan for this. There is a huge title confusion within the company. Some EMs code, some doesn't, and there is the Principal role that they don't know well. The interview process was very amateur for a publicly listed company.

The HM screener didn't capture all data. Even though we sat later after the interview and chatted about the challenges facing the team and how my solutions would be great to solve them. And then the rec calls and says it's not a go because "I didn't talk about my coding" .So I had to say in the rec call that I do know stuff just that HM didn't ask at all even though I did tell about a project that I wrote 100%. The rec then says we'll schedule next round and then the team delayed calling me for 2 weeks and then they say they filled up the position. A month later I get the call from rec to know if I'm still interested as the previous candidate didn't join after the offer. I say sure, gave 2 tech interviews (coding and system design). I solve both of them. So after another 2 weeks, I get rejected because apparently javascript that I used as my coding language "didn't look neat", even though I solved the original problem and the later addition to it. Even in the system design I solved it but the feedback was "Initial solution wasn't right" but I'd arrived on the final solution based on questions by the interviewer to which he didn't have any doubt. This was the worst interviewing experience of my life. This was for the Toronto office.