The talent manager reached out to me, we had a nice chat about the company, the role and my experience and expectations. Then I was given a take-home assignment based on a research paper. The task was well-scoped conceptually, but it turned out to be more time-intensive than the description suggested. I invested about 2 days into it, prioritising a solid code architecture over chasing peak accuracy metrics. Sadly, my solution didn't meet the team's performance expectations and I wasn't moved forward. The evaluation criteria focused on code quality and structure and didn't explicitly mention accuracy or other performance metrics. On a good note, the feedback from the team was truly valuable and I appreciated it.