Initial Techno Managerial screening round : This was more dedicated towards what I had done in the past and at my current job and asking some basic questions. The interviewer had probably come with a list of questions. Asked whatever they wanted, a quick what questions do you have for me and done in 15 mins. This was a 30 minutes scheduled interview.
Then they asked me to schedule a technical coding screening 1 hour round where I was asked a Leetcode medium question which I did amazingly well. I was able to come up with the most optimum solution but I felt even if I did not have the most optimum solution it would have been okay.
Then they scheduled 5 onsite (due to covid, all onsite were virtual video interviews) rounds.
The first was a 90 minutes technical coding. They asked me a leet code medium/hardish question which I was able to solve without any help but since it was recursion question 4 of my test cases did not pass due to stack overflow. I tried to think of a different approach but the interviewer himself mentioned that Java is probably not the right language for this question. The interviewer was helpful and definitely communicative.
Then there was a 30 minutes interview with an architect and we went over the architecture of the application I was working at on my current job and the interview felt positive.
Then there was another 30 minutes interview with an engineering manager and a product manager and he kept throwing technical questions at me very rapidly. He mentioned that this was some exercise that they do during interviews. I think I did pretty well in this round as well as I was able to provide answers to all their questions.
Then there was another 45 minutes interview with the same person with whom I had the first techno managerial round but like before they had come up with a set of questions for me these were more behavioral focused this time and then they gave me some time to ask them some questions.
At last there was a 90 minutes technical coding interview. This guy asked me a Leetcode Hard question and this one was so hard that at first it took me some time to how to approach it. By the end of it with some help from the interviewer I was able to provide a solution which passed 2 test cases but not the remaining 5. Frankly after reading the question I had become really really nervous and that definitely hampered my confidence to solve the question.
After all of this the HR came back immediately and wanted my expectations. I did not provide any numbers but the next day he called and said everyone is really impressed by my performance but due to my performance in the last round they want to offer a software engineer position instead of senior software engineer and the base salary they offered was just a couple of thousand more than my current job. I said I needed some time.
Frankly I had lost interest in the position after looking at the numbers they were offering. I know people who work at this company and i know the kind of work they do but their interview questions are not at all a representative of that. The interview questions are extremely difficult and I feel if someone can solve those questions they can get a job at one of the FAANG companies which offer much better salaries.