Applied via employee referral. After ~6 weeks, I received a phone call from a recruiter to set up an interview. The interview was a panel with the hiring manager and a few peers. They all clearly read and understood my resume prior to the interview and we did a deep dive into my previous experiences, what skills they are looking for, and how my skills apply to this role. There were a few behavioral questions. No Leetcode/Hackerrank style live coding questions, which I personally feel are completely unnecessary for this level. Compared to my interview experiences with other companies, this was super low stress and it seemed more like a natural, enjoyable conversation about the job rather than getting endlessly grilled about optimizing big O for code or whatever. This was by far the best interview experience I've had. Less than a week later, I received and accepted an offer.

Zero feedback, never respond email. Don't expect recruiter to help on anything, they are slow on everything. All you can do is wait, and try to apply for something else while waiting for NG's response.

So interview was pretty straightforward until it was time for me to ask questions. After asking what kind of unclassified projects they worked out of the San Diego office, you know to spur up conversation.. I was met with "Well that's something you can Google". You know.. when you asked me technical questions, would you have liked me to respond with, "that's something you can Google?" Extremely unprofessional, and glad the work environment showed in that response.