Met them at a job fair, and my contact from the job fair forwarded me over to the recruiter. The recruiter was very nice, but immediately sent me an email saying they weren't interested. I wrote them back asking for more info, as I have plenty of experience in this area, and she emailed saying that was actually a mistake and that she'd set me up with and interview. On the interview, I was expecting more of a 20 min phone screen or something, as it was my first contact with them really, but it ended up being a full hour call. I was kind of rushing the first half of the call, thinking I had limited time, but after I realized it was going to be an hour long call felt more comfortable and felt like I got to have a pretty good conversation with the interviewer. I was then asked to do a coding challenge, which almost felt intentionally vague, but it was a request that I build a front-end only autocomplete using their API. Arbitrarily, I needed to use SASS or LESS, and a build system like Gulp, and it had to be hosted on GH Pages. In addition to the coding challenge, I needed to answer a bunch of questions about pricing and their system. The coding challenge was a little annoying, as the expectation is that you'll learn their whole ecosystem, which is basically a complete waste if you don't get the job because it's pretty unlikely you'll need that knowledge again. In addition, they were pretty clear in the interview that you'd be helping to implement their code and building demos for clients, which means it could be overkill to use Gulp or something similar. Regardless, I made an autocomplete using Angular and their API. I probably could have made something organized a bit better, and definitely could have gone overboard with Gulp (I only used it for what seemed necessary on such a small site). Due to the vague instructions I ended up doing a full-stack solution first, then realized I needed to start from scratch and make it entirely front-end. I'd had really great experiences with their recruiter, but at this point I got a form email from someone I'd never heard of saying they were not moving forward (from a noreply email address) with absolutely no explanation as to what they didn't like in the coding challenge.

Overall, the interview process was very thorough. I got a chance to have a conversation with many different people across varying roles. Throughout the process, the recruiter was fully transparent about my progress and next steps. I had an 2 initial Skype calls with current CSEs, followed by a technical exercise and Skype call to review. The exercise consisted of creating a project using modern front-end technologies and the Algolia API. The final interview was a full day on-site that ended with an extemp presentation. Questions focused on technical, UX, and client communication skills.