Headhunter reached out. Standard process for today's standards - live coding, architecture, present a project, bar raiser/"cultural fit". They're letting you code/build simplified versions of their product, I liked it. Their interviewers are quite bad at selling the company. You basically get the feeling that they're just in a very competitive field and have to do everything to win on the enterprise market. Quite hard to convince yourself this is the place to be. Got ghosted after going through the entire process, classic, just disrespectful and unneccessary. I see it as a dodged bullet, I suspect their org is still super messy that it wouldn't be that enjoyable anyways given the pressure they now get through the valuation.

The hiring team was good and I could detect good level on each interviewe. The process took 4 months to be finished due to constant rescheduling from them. The recruiter agency told me constantly I had good feedback from the team and they'd likely offer Staff engineer position. After 4 months and 5 interviews however they said my level is "High Senior" and not even Staff and they preferred not even making an offer. They could have stopped the process earlier instead wasting the time of everyone. They seem to be skilled but I don't think they are mature enough to understand principal level positions at unicorn companies. For the coding session using AI part of the feedback was "you didn't finish the exercise on time" what I consider a extremely junior feedback.