Went through 6 rounds of Interviews. (HR, HM, take home coding assignment, technical interview discussing assignment, tech lead interview, sys design, product manager interview). Ended up being ghosted after final round. The interview process itself was easy but disrespectful to not get any communication after investing time into the interview process. This is maybe indicative of culture at Zus so possibly dodged a bullet:) Towards the end of the interview process, I was asked to provide references that would be used to determine candidacy.

Recruiters were solid, pushed me through the process as quickly as they could because I had a competing offer. Handful of interviews, two technical rounds. The technical rounds were very easy, a small coding challenge and code review as well as some system design. They have a very strange reference checking process though, and things break down here. Asked for multiple rounds of references, where they demanded meetings with my professional network. The questions asked of them were largely irrelevant and included strange survey style questions (“Rate this engineer on 1-10”) that should have been settled in earlier stages. The management that conducts them were not people I interviewed with either, so the process seemed fraught with bias and internal office politics without any actual signal gathered from the candidate themself. These reference interviews decide if an offer is made. The whole thing was very unprofessional, and probably the most disrespected I have ever felt in an interview. Big red flag, so at least it’s signal. Stay away, these people are ultimately just here to waste candidate time.