The company reached out to me; I did not apply. The process then ran several rounds: a recruiter screen, a call with the hiring engineer, an hour-long interview with the head of product, and a 90-minute live backend coding challenge with screen-sharing and check-ins every ~20 minutes. The people were professional, the coding challenge was reasonable and clearly described, and AI tools were allowed.
My critique is the time-to-feedback ratio. They sourced me, then asked for roughly four hours across multiple rounds, including an hour with the head of product and a 90-minute live build. After all of it, I received a completely generic rejection ("moving forward with other candidates") with zero feedback. When a company recruits you and asks for this level of investment, closing it out with boilerplate and no specifics makes it feel like the candidate's time wasn't valued.
Good people and a well-run technical round, but an inbound, multi-round, multi-hour process ending in a no-feedback form rejection left a poor final impression.