Stages: 1. 30-min greeting call with an external recruiter to review your and the company's profile. 2. Tech task: you have 1 week to develop a fully working API with clean code and architecture. There were 3 calls to implement: 1 POST and 2 GETs. Also, there is a Producer-Consumer topic present, where one service creates a job and another service (or BackgroundWorker in .NET) consumes it. Additionally, there is a list of requirements such as "must do the proper logging". Quite a heavy exercise, you will have to commit a lot of hours to do it properly. I made an ASP.NET Core (.NET 5) API with the Domain-Driven Design (DDD). 3. 1h-long call with a Team Lead and a Senior DevOps engineer. First, you discuss your solution with them, what decisions you made, what to improve. Then they ask you about your experience, what tech stack you worked with. 4. "Something off" stage. First, it was meant to be a 30-min talk with the CTO, which did not happen because the interviewer got sick. Then, I was told to do such an interview with 2 members of my potential team, that one did go. I was told there was nothing to prepare, and it was just talking. It turned out to be a set of very generic questions (see an example below), and I got rejected. I kept asking "Does that make sense?" and "Does that answer your question?", that helped to stay connected with the interviewers, and got "yes" as an answer multiple times. The rejection reason is: "vague answers", which does not make sense to me on its own, nor on how it is related to the work environment.

The first round of the interview was with a recruiter from the Ohpen hiring team, after which I was asked to complete a technical assignment. I spent considerable time and effort on the task and submitted a well-structured solution via GitHub, which included two separate projects (an API and a console app) following a microservices architecture using the latest .NET technologies. However, the feedback I received was surprisingly inaccurate. The reviewer claimed there was no README, no unit tests, no documentation, and only one project provided—all of which were demonstrably false. The GitHub invitation I sent them to access the private repositories was never even accepted and remains in pending status, which strongly suggests the assignment was not reviewed at all or only partially. This was disappointing, especially given the time invested and the completeness of the solution. It reflects poorly on the review process and overall professionalism. I would advise other candidates to be cautious and ensure that your work is being fairly and fully evaluated. Pros: Initial communication was prompt and friendly. The technical assignment was a real-world use case and well-scoped. Cons: Extremely poor and seemingly superficial evaluation of the assignment. Feedback I received was clearly inaccurate and made claims (e.g., "no README", "no unit tests", "no documentation") despite all those elements being included and well-structured in the submission. The reviewer seemed to only check one part of the solution (likely a console app) and completely missed the main API project that showcased the required functionality, clean architecture, unit tests, and modern tech stack. Time investment (~1.5 days) was completely dismissed without a proper or respectful review.