Applied for a Senior Platform Engineer role. The process was five rounds total and took about 3.5 weeks from first screen to offer.
Round 1 (recruiter): 30 min, standard. She actually knew the team and what they worked on, which is rarer than it should be.
Round 2 (take-home): They sent a lightweight coding problem, something like building a webhook delivery system with retries. Open-ended, open internet, 48-hour window. I used Go and actually read their Webhooks docs to inform the design. That part felt deliberate, like they wanted to see if I'd bother.
Round 3 (technical deep dive): An hour with two engineers. Half my take-home walkthrough, half system design. We spent a lot of time on failure modes: what happens when the downstream is slow, how do you backpressure without losing messages. Real problems. I liked it.
Round 4 (behavioral): Two 45-min rounds back to back. STAR-method, but they pushed for specifics. One question was 'tell me about a time you made a call that turned out to be wrong, and what you did after.' Be ready to actually answer that.
Round 5 (hiring manager): More culture and team fit, also a chance to ask real questions about the roadmap.
Overall the process felt like they were evaluating someone who'd actually do the job. No fizzbuzz, no 'reverse a linked list' stuff. The take-home framing with their own product was the biggest signal about what they value.