I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Binti
Interview
The only interview review here should have been an indication of how things would go with Binti, but I was excited so I proceeded through their full interview process. The first step was 45 minutes with an engineering manager. They seemed disengaged and spoke about a large number of candidates they had already interviewed so the conversation was sometimes strained and awkward but we powered through. We talked about high-level past experiences and what kind of role I'm looking for. I must have passed that first round (without any indication or follow-up from the recruiter) because I received a Woven assessment via email to complete. This was the second red flag: outsourcing technical interviews. The Woven assessment was two hours of debugging, writing an email, and parsing a mocked payload. The feedback from the Woven team (not Binti engineers) on my submission was detailed and helpful. I was then moved to another round which was two hours of discussing the Woven submission mixed with behavioral questions from a PM. I quickly got the news that I would be moved to the final, 3-hour pair-programming round. That was an engineer working on a ticket from their codebase. That went quite well; I completed the task in the given time, then spent an additional twenty minutes on the call to present my work to another two engineers. These conversations appeared to go well and I looked forward to hearing back from the recruiter. After ten hours of time spent with this team (round 0: recruiter call: 30 min, round 1: 45 min w/ manager, round 2: 2.5 hours of Woven plus their prep guide, round 3: 2 hours technical & behavioral, round 4: 3.5 hours), I was highly disappointed to see a generic, canned rejection response from the recruiting team. They are on top of things until you ask for something (like feedback) in return. The recruiters had no issue with asking me to spend more than ten hours of my personal, unpaid time with their team and I completed all tasks asked of me. But once I was rejected and asked for feedback on why it's been radio silence. This is a broken ten-hour process. Candidates deserve better; be human to them.
I applied through other source. I interviewed at Binti
Interview
The CEO reached out to me, which initially made me very interested in the opportunity because I really valued the company’s mission. So, I decided to go through the process — starting with a recruiter call, then an async technical interview, and finally an in-person onsite.
Unfortunately, the interview process felt extremely disorganized and improvised. I was told I had advanced to the final onsite before they had even figured out what that round would include. The onsite itself wasn’t great — one of the interviewers seemed disengaged, not very responsive, and started typing every time after I asked a question. I couldn’t tell if she was doing her own work or taking notes on me. It felt uncomfortable and unprofessional.
The technical evaluation focused heavily on Ruby on Rails, which surprised me given that my background is primarily in infrastructure and backend systems. It felt like they were expecting deep Rails expertise for a role that wasn’t clearly defined that way — and I personally think the stack is a bit dated for what they’re trying to achieve.
Afterwards, I was told they wanted someone with more tenure and more full-stack experience. That feedback didn’t make much sense considering my resume clearly shows a strong infrastructure and backend background, and that could have been identified much earlier in the process. It felt like expectations weren’t aligned from the start and was a huge waste of my time.
On a positive note, I still think highly of the company’s mission and the work they’re doing, but the interview experience was highly disappointing and felt like a huge waste of time, and it was a reflection of how poorly they operate internally.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Implement a feature for a Ruby on Rails application
Interviewer showed up several minutes late without so much as a "sorry for the delay." They asked a few broad-level "tell me about yourself" questions, then spent most of the time talking about themselves and the company. There was no time for my questions; the interview was very one-sided. They also came across as rather condescending about my background and location, making it clear--despite the remote position--that they prefer candidates from big cities and flashy tech companies. It left such a bad taste in my mouth that I considered asking them to take me out of the pipeline, though I figured I didn't stand a chance regardless. I was right.
