FluentStream Technologies interview questions

Series of 1:1 interviews that culminated in a project-based presentation and panel interview. For the project, I was given a hypothetical customer request and asked to provide a walkthrough of the process and tools I would use to evaluate it and make it come to fruition. While the project wasn't necessarily "difficult" it was thought-provoking and the hands-on approach was a really cool, tangible way to demonstrate my skillset.

Strange interview process. I was asked to design a system in AWS, with very little instruction given. The original problem turned out to be obsolete, as the data set they wanted me to use had changed since they had created this problem. They scheduled a sync-up meeting with me where they said they would answer any questions I had, but they seemed totally uninterested in talking about my project, and they seemed to only want to discuss personal life, so throughout the project I had practically no guidance. I had almost no idea what exactly they were looking for. I created a high availability serverless system with CI/CD, containerization, and automated testing. When the final interview came, I was asked to present, but they were frequently interrupting with "gotcha" questions, many of which were unrelated to my project or the current topic. They seemed to care more about the minutiae of AWS lambdas and CIDR blocks than anything else. Eventually the engineer leading the interview abruptly dropped about 15 minutes before the stated end time. I was unable to ask any questions, which I had many. I got an email a few days later saying that they had nothing negative to say, except that I said "I don't know" one too many time to their questions. They also commented that they did not believe I was senior level. Most of their questions were unrelated to my project or incredibly vague. An example of that is when they asked "What is the shape of that security key you're using?" I still don't know what they meant by that, or if they actually understood my system fully. It was also very apparent that the engineers/company did not have any knowledge of containerization, CICD, Infrastructure-as-code, or serverless systems, so it was a very strange how critical they were for me not knowing minor, sometimes irrelevant details about their industry or system (for example, the project was in JavaScript but they kept asking me about cold start issues with Java lambdas). They specified that it had to be done in AWS with a deployment mechanism. This made the project relatively costly. The system I made cost about $500 and 10 days of spare time. If you interview with FluentStream, you should insist they provide you with an AWS account so you're not the one paying. Found a better company paying more a few days later. Would not recommend wasting your time with FluentStream.