There were multiple interview rounds coupled with a home assignment. First a standard recruiter screening call, then an interview with a hiring manager. Home assignment, which took me a whole working day to get done, was next. After some cursory feedback on the code, I received an invitation to a debugging session to figure out what was wrong in a mock service. Another call with a recruiter, which would have been followed by a 90-minute team interview and a call with a senior manager, but I dropped out of the process at that point because I didn't have enough software development experience for the seniority level I was aiming at. The company would have been interested in continuing the talks for the lower seniority position, but based on talks with the recruiter, they couldn't have matched my current comp package. In short, there were way too many interview rounds (consider combining some of them) and the home assignment took too much time. I spent at least 12 hours in the interview process, and would have spent 2-3 hours more if I'd continued, which I consider excessive. Agreeing on a time for the interviews was also hard - consider using a system where the candidate can select a suitable time from the interviewer's calendar, so multiple emails are not needed for scheduling a meeting.

I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. The whole interview process takes 4 steps: - HR interview - Hiring manager interview - Home assignment (Web monitoring application in Python) - Team interview The first two steps were quite ordinary, and the HR manager was nice. The home assignment takes too long to do. It took me at least 10 hours to finish it, but the Aiven team expects you to write production-ready code with tests, docs and full exception handling in your free time. It should also be scalable and at the same time simple and not overengineered. They give you 1 week to do this. If you have a lot of time and willpower to endure 4 interview steps and big homework, then good luck. Otherwise, try something else.