First a call from the recruiter. He seemed quite desperate and did hint a few times that the firm would IPO. Then he set me up with a call from the Director of Eng. I thought this conversation went well. They then called me to their office. In this round I met with 3 people - the director(again), a tech lead and a senior manager. The conversation with the director started off well. But then it degenerated into ominous management questions. I very quickly got the impression that this place was too political. The director was interested in knowing how I could navigate meddling from other departments, how I would build consensus with management even for small product updates, etc. I was quite disappointed with these questions. It led me to believe that even with this firm being small there was too much micromanagement and politics. The 2nd interview was with a tech lead and we quickly hit it off well. We had a lot of common topics to discuss across projects, architecture, etc. The 3rd interviewer seemed too smug. He snidely indicated that I could not have done some of the work at my current workplace because I lacked the knowledge. He then proceeded to ask me how to convert a multiple inheritance hierarchy from C++ to Java. While this in itself is a good question, it was hard to understand what he was getting at with almost no hints. Another question was an architecture question about AWS which made no sense considering they don't even use it. I was able to answer it though. I felt I wasted my time interviewing for this position.