My interview consisted of multiple conversations with the recruiter, one phone screen with a developer and then 2 on-site sessions. In total, I met 11 people over 12 rounds of conversation. After a conversation with the recruiter, I got the phone screen with a member of the tech staff. The conversation revolved around my experience, background and interest. There were not hands-on coding involved. Then after another conversation with the recruiter, I got to the on-site. Out of the 6 rounds of interviews on-site, 3 were technical - one whiteboard coding, one system design and one database design (data modeling, ORM and such). I met the CTO (seemed like a very sharp guy with solid background) and a director in the engineering team - who talked mostly about development philosophy, challenges, management and my past experience. At the end of the day, I met the CEO (Alexa Hirschfeld). The only lowlight of the day was one of the engineers who, after I told him that I have no experience in database design, lost all interest and spent the entire ~45 minutes on his phone. (I could see him typing on Slack.) Around the middle of the day, I had lunch with the person who interviewed me over phone. (I hope this was not an interview. He did not ask any technical question.) After that, the called me in again "for lunch". This time I had lunch with a group of 4 engineers including the CTO. This was a bit awkward for me, since it was clearly an interview yet I was expected to pretend that it was just lunch. A few days later the recruiter told me that they will pass.

Everyone was nice and I had a good time talking with them, but in the technical screening there was a gauntlet of pop quiz questions with obscure topics such as MD5 hashing, obscure HTTP methods (head, options), and specific git commands. I can understand wanting someone to have a large breadth of knowledge but expecting someone to know all of these answers off the top of their head will result in losing lots of quality candidates.