WARNING: If you are a Person of Color (POC) DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME applying here. They discriminate against POC people especially for staff level position and have no intention of hiring them and waste their time. They should be clear that they only want to hire Irish person, that way they won't waste POC candidate's time. I am a POC. I successfully cleared ALL the 5 rounds, had successful reference checks and after successful reference checks I was further given positive feedback stating the management/team likes my "tech skills", "communication", "leadership", "mentorship", "collaboration", "team building in complex projects" etc. Yet, ironically next week on monday they said "unfortunately" the team decided not to proceed with me because now magically the management was looking for more "communication", more "collaboration" and more "leadership" which was a complete contradiction (and 180 U turn) to what they said me just a few days back. When I probed the HR further on what he meant by "more collaboration" and "more communication" they were not even able to point and highlight why the team now magically thinks this way when just few days back the team shared that these were my strongest skills. All the HR said was "yeah its unfortunate" (no explanation) and it was clear that the management wants to hire someone "local/Irish" for such high level position (and came up with lame excuse to eliminate me so as to not come across as overtly racist) because the entire management was "Irish" (atleast all the people I interviewed were all Irish). Distilled just strings POC candidates and keeps them in interview till they find Irish person who interviews and the POC candidates are magically eliminated from the interview process inspite of clearing all the rounds, including successful reference checks (companies only do reference checks if they want to offer). SO yeah, for staff level and higher up positions (leadership/impactful roles) there is a VISIBLE DISCRIMINATION against POC and I honestly do think that if you are a POC then don't waste time interviewing at distilled. For software developers things may be different as those are not leadership roles (but who knows). Distilled should be ASHAMED of blatant racism and discrimination and should be upfront that they want to hire ONLY Irish person for high level role, that would be atleast more respectful of POC candidate's time.

I applied to the position and a 45 min interview with the CTO happened 3 days later. It was unusual that there was no initial phone screen with HR. The interview itself was straightforward, typical questions about my experience and career goals, and some high level questions about aspects in hindsight. However, I thought some questions were too vague, and didn't give enough information without having to make a lot of assumptions. It felt like there was not enough context for a fully formed answer, and so I felt that I could not answer it in a satisfactory way.