This was a while back, but I'm a young(ish) woman and they openly told me 'you're our guinea pig!' at the beginning of the interview. It honestly felt like they asked the recruiter to give them someone they could test their poor format out on and the fact that they decided to pick a minority in the field is... icky.
Additionally, the feedback I got was weird. They told me I didn't recognize a certain error and that means I'm not experienced but the reality is that they were using a crummy editor and VScode extension flags missed imports for me so I would have recognized it in my own development environment right away.
Had behaviorals first with the HR and hiring manager. Questions are mainly around fit and they gave you a lot of time to ask questions. Afterwards, I did a case study based on their provided materials and presented conclusions to the team with a deliverable.
I have relatively few years of experience, which I was transparent about from the outset and is clearly reflected on my resume.
I made it to the final round of interviews, only to be declined with the explanation "they're looking for candidates who are more senior." They knew my level of seniority from the beginning, so the entire process was a waste of my time and theirs.
The timeline from when I applied to when I got declined was 2 months. During this time I had 5 rounds of interviews, sometimes with 1-2 weeks of no communication between rounds.
1. Recruiter phone screen
2. Meeting with manager
3. Meeting with prospective team
4. Tech challenge
5. Meeting with eng exec
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Why do you want to work here (implied: how do you feel about working at a defense contractor)?