i've been through a lot of design interviews. the HF one was genuinely different in a few ways and i think worth documenting for designers who are considering the loop.
context: the role is product designer for the Hub, their main platform. the design team is small relative to the company's reach -- they're not a design-led company in the way Figma or Linear are. that actually mattered a lot for how they evaluated candidates.
recruiter call (30 min) they asked specifically about experience designing for developer audiences, which is their user base. if you've only designed B2C consumer products, you'll need to reframe your work around developer workflows and think about things like information density, power user needs, and preference for functionality over visual polish.
portfolio review (75 min) this was with two designers and a PM. you present 2-3 case studies. they don't want slide decks. they want a Figma link or a Loom or something closer to the actual artifact. the questions were very process-focused: how did you decide what problem to solve, how did you handle conflict with engineering about feasibility, what would you do differently.
the thing that caught me off guard: they asked me to critique the current HF model page UI. this is a trap if you're not prepared. don't just list what's ugly. come in with observations about what the current design is optimizing for and where user needs (from the perspective of a researcher vs a casual browser) diverge from each other. they actually want a thoughtful opinion, not politeness.
design exercise (take-home, 3 days) they gave me a prompt: improve the experience of discovering relevant datasets on the hub. open-ended, no figma template, deliver whatever format you think is right. i built out a light research brief, a few directional explorations in Figma, and a 1-page rationale. they said the quality of the rationale mattered as much as the designs.
debrief was 45 minutes, very collaborative. they poke at your assumptions. if you can't explain why you made a choice without saying "i felt like" you're going to struggle.
behavioral (45 min with EM) how do you work with engineers who think design is "making things pretty." how do you do user research when you have limited access to users. what's a design decision you made that turned out to be wrong.
overall the process respected my time. they didn't ask me to do speculative work on real products (unlike some shops that basically want a free redesign). the portfolio debrief was the highest-signal round by far. spend the most time preparing for that.