There was an initial phone screen. We then followed up with a full day of interviews. After that I had several other calls trying to find a team that would be a good fit. The actual interviews were fine, but the handling by the recruiter was a mess. I started with one recruiter, completed the phone screen and was told I did well. I had to follow up 3 times over the course of three weeks to finally get my full day of interviews scheduled. Those interviews in general were fairly easy and went pretty well. They ranged from technical topics to leadership questions (tell me about a time when..). Strangely though, my very first interview of the day was with my "hiring manager" who let me know that the position I was interviewing for had just been filled (great :/ ). I was assured both by him and my recruiter that they would still find a team for me if they thought Square would be a good fit. After the day of interviews, I again got good feedback and was told they'd be reaching out with potential team matches. Shortly thereafter I got an offer from another company, so told them that I needed to speed the process up as fast as possible to avoid leaving the other company waiting. Over the course of the week I had 4 phone calls with two different teams. The first had a near perfect domain alignment in terms of the things they were working on with my background, but was a different tech stack than most of my experience. The other was a tech stack fit, but not domain. The team with the tech stack team though said they were early in their process of talking to candidates and didn't want to decide on my timeline. The other one seemed like the option then. It went to hiring bar (after over a week of back and forth), but they decided I needed to do one more interview before they'd be able to decide. I did that, seemed to go well, but at the hiring bar the next day they told me "well we think you'll be great at square, but we're not quite convinced. That manager wants to talk to more people so just sit tight". All while they knew I had another offer and a deadline on the table. I ended up with no offer because I wasn't willing to wait. It was especially frustrating because throughout the whole 2 month process the recruiter started every call with "are there any timeline constraints? We can speed the process up if need be" which was certainly a lie. It felt like my time had no value to them. It's incredibly disheartening to hear nothing but positive feedback, but no offer being made. They put so much effort into the interview process, but their HR team really dropped the ball with me.

Inital take home, followed by extension interview, followed by a coding challenge, followed by system design interview. The whole process took 3 months! The interviewers are usually really nice and want you to do your best.