Apply to the offer via Recruiter, i have to say that the recruiter is a great professional with huge experience and skills. 1) Interview with HR. Very professional, she was very kind and with the right skills for this position, i really had the feeling that she wants to solve all the problems and makes things better, very good imho. 2) Challenge, not really clear what is the scope and delivery requirements. The use of Tier-3 is very ambiguous. It seems they want an app, but also a IAC code like Ansible / Terraform to deploy all this. I provided a Kubernetes 3Zone Cluster + SQL Replication (other services are too expensive for a free test) with Nginx->Flask->SQL . All escalable, ha, failover, balanced, etc. Throughput was about 350hit/s for 1 single instance. 3) Meet the CEO. Here is where comes the hard part. He is a smart guy. But he have several problems.. - He impose an unreasonable control over everything. - He don't know how to delegate. Probably because of the previous point. - He try to run too much areas CEO,CTO,COO,CFO,HR Manager... trying to do too much, achieving too little. Aftership is a immature StartUp that does not follow basics of DevOps CAMS neither SRE minimum practices (risk, error budget, slo/sli definition). If you mention this, you are discarded. I had the impression that if you question the current methods, approach or doubt about anything.. you'll not get the job. Even after several hours of discussions, i still not got to understand what the 'company culture' is in AfterShip, is just a ofter repeated euphemism to discard non-zombies. I believe that is required to be a 'believer' of fairy tales represented by someone you just met.. or an authentic liar to say yes yes you are the best and i love your company culture, even if you don't really think. I guess here is not valued own though, constructive criticism or even questions regarding how are the current processes. The CEO stated, was that he does NOT want people that overpass the average level of skill/knowledge/experience of the rest of the team.. he believe that anyone in 1 year can arrive to same level if they want to. For him nothing is impossible.. you only need to believe it.. I guess that Stephen Hawkins did not tried or wanted to believe that he could not cure his disease ?? .. only immature people think in this way, not using realistic though to understand what is possible and what is not. For end, thats the most shocking thing.. he passing rate of this step is 0.6% .. and he does not even consider that the 'method' he is applying may be wrong. Truth is that he may be afraid that half company leaves again suddenly as it happened in the past.. so i think he is looking to hire braindead zombies that can run some tasks without questioning. Unfortunately .. Critical Thinking is a requirement for SRE/DEVOPS.. so i don't really think he is never gonna fill this position.. and he's been trying to hire for this position for over 1 year.. Bro, get back to earth.. the problem are not the candidates.. your biggest problem in the past.. was you... which is exactly your present problem.. and if you don't step aside and let qualified professionals to do their job and start to accept constructive criticism, because this is part of their job... assume mistakes and accept criticism is the only way to improve, you got the evident part of "I MISTAKE, I CAN IMPROVE" but you forgot to listen other perspectives and approach... Eventually your current workers soon or later will change company.. but its gonna be very hard for you to replace them. Sometimes grow is a leap of faith and assume that maybe others can do better then you. Be CTO, CEO, CFO, COO .. but just 1 of them, focus and do that one as best as possible.. stop that company culture demagogy fairy tale .. and quit the role of "The Messiah". Your Product is nice, and its just a matter of time that someone make an open source JS alternative that put you out of business.. watch out and think what other things you can develop before that happens.