The process was not that bad, although they clearly were looking for all-in-one engineer to solve their problems. Moreover, issues with company culture showed up. The first interview was already technical with VP and other DevOps engineer. I started with asking them how hard do they stay on stric requirements listed in job description, as I didn't match all of them - it was something I normally expect 1st screening interview iwth HR to clarify. Those requiemenets included DBA role "profficiency"/"mastery" and they said they really need them, I reiterated that I'm more of DB user with basic experience in query optimization and DB maintenance, but we agreed to give it a try. It turned out that pure logic was enough to solve their questions, which were clearly issues they faced on early stages of their product development. Same story for performance tuning and observability. Other questions were about platform, infrastructure, network and similar. Some of those were competent - like what I don't like about Terraform. In the meantime, I found other offer posting with higher slary ranges. They avoided clear answer, but understood my hint that I may want more if that's on the table. Next stage was live coding session with their developer and it was a pleasant experience. It was not about coding or extra algorithms, but rather thinking and general programming. I was allowed to consult internet, but had to show my thought process. Then I was invited into "home assignement", and I was to choose suitable meeting date (which would also be a submission deadline). They had difficulty explaining in a clear manner that they give me 3 days for a task that should take me just few hours. Same about 60 minutes interview structure. Finally, after I agreed for a meeting they dropped the interview process, clearly stating they found someone else with more time pressure. This is funny, as they were so prcise about finding expert, but chose someone desperate to start ASAP.