30 minutes with a hiring manager as a first step. Interviewer was late and forgot most of the questions he wanted to ask. Admitted to not really knowing what the team was looking for in the role. There was barely a conversation. It was a very disappointing interview after general excitement to be interviewing at Braze.

One recruiter phone screen to understand motivation, background and some questions about the resume. Phone: 45mins Hiring Manager interview lightweight behavioral on leadership style etc. Onsite 1 round of debugging , they send you a zip file and you run with the language you preferred, it's a convoluted caesar cipher/decipher piece of code and you need to fix the unit tests. 1 round of system design. Design a service that will crawl google with a given list of keywords to determine which position their ads show up, the marketing team has several questions they want to answer with the output from your service. Like, how often do my ads show up in the first position from the search engine etc. 1 round of meeting with your future skip level, high level leadership style questions. 1 round of meeting with the future team. They ask questions around execution, team culture, communication style etc. 1 round of hiring manager interview, again, tell me one time you influenced your team on a technical direction sorta questions. The overall interview process was pretty straightforward, typical startup stuff, agile, iterative, servant leader etc. The hiring manager was awkward and cold, I didn't get a good vibe from him and probably the feeling was mutual. The recruiter was pretty sloppy, at first she ghosted our initial call and didn't reschedule until several days later, then requested another followup call but didn't send over the meeting link etc. After she informed me that I didn't get the job, I asked for feedback and there was no response. I get it, the market is competitive and they are probably slammed with applications, but hey, it's a small world.

After an initial call with the recruiter to understand the company / role and discuss my background, I was moved to the next interview round with the hiring manager. The hiring manager interview was pretty laid back where he spoke about the team and their goals. After several weeks of radio silence from the recruiter I learned that the engineering manager position was filled internally. Seemed like there was a huge disconnect between recruitment and the management organization to begin with leading to a big waste of everyone's time.