I applied for an Engineering Manager role at Bolt, Tallinn. I had a short call with the recruiter who was very unprofessional in the beginning while having the initial call with her. She postponed the call 3 times at the last minute. Anyhow, we managed to have a call and she explained the hiring process. Then I was interviewed by the hiring manager, who was the senior engineering manager in Bolt. The HM behaved very rudely during the leadership round. Rather than knowing my opinion, he was preassuming my answers and putting his opinions forcefully on me. In the beginning, the HM introduced the project and a bit about himself and then he said that he didn't want to know about my history and experience, he didn't even ask me to introduce myself. The very first question he asked me "Did I fire anyone in the company? " When I tried to explain the circumstances of firing someone from my experience, he was not listening to me and started misbehaving. He was carrying a bossy attitude. From his point of view, if the team reaches out to you and shares the feedback with you, you don't need to do anything about that feedback. In fact, you do not have to collect feedback from your team in any matter. He later asked me "If I could do coding" to which I said I've been a developer for the last 7 years and I can do coding to which he replied that we would get to know that in the next round (his behaviour raised a red flag for me). The 3rd question was "About the author whom I follow for leadership?" I said I attend webinars, workshops, agile meetings, and online courses to keep myself updated with the latest trends and technologies to enhance my leadership skills to which he commented that all this is useless and a waste of time. Lastly, he asked me about the most important quality of the team. By that time, I said "RESPECT" and he looked at me like an alien as if he heard this first time - how to give respect to other people and their opinions. Overall, the experience was pathetic. I was surprised by this attitude from Bolt. Bolt claims to be one of the best employers in Estonia and yet their management behaves like this.

Applied for an Engineering Manager role at their Warsaw branch. Had a short call with the recruiter, who was friendly and professional. Then I was interviewed by the hiring manager, who was also an engineering manager. The HM was friendly but relatively inexperienced. He didn't know what questions to ask, only talked for 10 min and let me ask the questions for the rest of the interview. I asked many questions and felt like I was interviewing him. And the interview ended early. The reporting line would be I, as an EM, report to him, also an EM, then he reports to a senior EM, which seemed like a major red flag. As for the next stage, the HM told me it would be a "system design interview", whereas the recruiter told me it would be an "API design interview". So I thought it was gonna be designing an API service. But no, it turns out it to be a complete waste of time. This design interview was conducted by a staff engineer. In the first half, he asked me a lot of leadership questions, which seemed a bit strange to be questioned by someone with no leadership experience. Can't they spare a senior engineering manager for such an interview? In the second half, he asked me to write some API endpoints in a google document... We spent an hour writing endpoint URLs and request and response payloads for a simple use case. There was no system design or anything related to the architecture. He was also reluctant to clarify my questions and just wanted me to type JSON in the google document and paying attention to small details. I seriously doubt how he will be able to judge if I'm a good engineering manager or not just by looking at this pointless exercise. There were no questions about scalability, observability, architecture, best practices, etc. Just API URLs and payloads. It seemed like an interview question for a junior developer. What a waste of time. The next day, I received a generic rejection email from the recruiter with no feedback. Overall, my impression of Bolt is that they are still a very young company and still trying to figure out how to do basic things. The result of the application seems pretty arbituary depending on the interviewer.