Gusto Senior Software Engineer interview questions

Overall I would give this a 'meh' in terms or interview. And I have done a number over my 10+ years of industry exp (and have worked at few places of this size). The process is long and you will get 'strung along' for sure. I will preface this with 'everybody I spoke with was nice'. The HR person was quite nice and accommodating. The hiring manager was also nice, but spoke very fast and kind of danced around the 'what would I do in this role' or the 'what would my day to day be like'. The whole process has a lot of rounds. To the point where I think they think they are a faang or some AI hype type company. I had multiple pre-onsite rounds. Then an onsite that I think was 4 to 5 rounds (I forget, it has been a few months...). The 'tech' questions and the 'system design' questions was quite generic and easy actually. To the point where we did not dig into anything 'meaty' at all. It was almost like the questions were meant to be more to a junior level person. I guess studying for leet code and tons of practical stuff was not ideal. I think I did fine on all the questions. They ended up not giving me an offer, but it took them a long time (I think 2.5 weeks) to give me a no, after a number of 'everybody loved you' type messages. I felt very strung along. They also have some 'values' interview. Honestly I think this is where I failed. It seems like it is more like 'does the hr person like you'. I had some 'red flags' for sure. Any message I had sent to the potential hiring manager or HR was ignored. There was not 1 part of the interview that actually determined how I would fit into this role. There was no direct questions on the domain itself for the role. There was no SQL or performance/scaling questions. There was no trouble shooting questions. I could not get a single answer of what I would do in this role. At all. I did get the vibe that engineering was kind of a second class citizen in the org. Which makes sense. But it also seems like the org moves very very slow and this was apparently in each interviewer telling me as such. I get the feel they are looking for 'bigger company' type people who are more interested in planning vs doing.

I had at least 10 interviews with this company spanning a period of 2 months. This included multiple coding rounds, multiple behavioral with different stakeholders and a system design interview. I was ghosted after this despite multiple positive indications throughout the process. If am being 100% honest, they do not really have any idea what they are doing and they seem a bit too comfortable wasting people's time. At the beginning of the interview the recruiter told me that they are just casually browsing so maybe the job postings seen on the websites do not even exist. I applied this time myself, but I was reached out by their recruiter a year ago who again ghosted me in the middle of the process without explanation.