The interview process can only be described as an utter waste of time. I was contacted by a recruiter, who I authorised to represent me on this application at Neo4j. After a few days, an initial video conference interview was set up, with a person from HR. It lasted about 45 minutes and obviously it didn't cover any technical aspects. At the end of the interview, the person from HR said she would arrange a follow up interview with the manager (technical interview I suppose). To my surprise, I received a call from the recruiter telling me that Neo4j had decided not to continue with the interview process, apparently because I didn't have a programming background... Nobody from Neo4j tested my coding skills at all, as the only interview I had was with a non-technical person.

Straightforward interview process. HR -> Hiring Manager -> Pair Programming. The hiring manager was probably the most knowledgeable person from the team and was realistic about the progress their team has made so far. Beware, the pair programming interview isn't a standard pair programming interview where the interviewers will walk through the solution you came up with. They're more likely to ask questions to deliberately confuse the interviewee based on pre meditated questions. The pair programming interview also involves asking questions on SLIs and SLOs. The interviewers seem to have far less experience in actually implementing any SLOs at Neo4j currently as its an upcoming work, yet they feel they're able to judge the interviewees with far more implementation experience in real life situations. Real life situations don't always fit what one might read from a Google's SRE book. Upon asking how many SLOs they've setup, the answer was nil. Quelle surprise. Don't be surprised if your understanding is deemed inadequate by a team who is yet to set up a single SLO from the ground up.