It's disappointing that this company is not giving interviewees an opportunity to bring their best foot forward by not giving an accurate description of what the first technical interview will entail. For me it was: 15 min of past experience, 30 min system design, 30 min coding, 10 min questions. In the email from the recruiter, and the technical prep article, it's not clear at all that there will be a 30 min system design interview - just mentions that it may go surface-level into system design. Since every other company I know doesn't ask this in the first round interview, I didn't prep for system design material.
Be prepared for lengthy systems design questions in this first screen. Understand microservices and architecture deeply. I was also doing this interview remote since I'm not where this role is based. It's difficult to do a system design question over hangout, and the setup was awkward, because one of the interviewers was trying to write on a whiteboard but I couldn't see what was written.
One of the interviewers was on his phone during the interview, and a dog walked in the first 5-10 minutes of the interview. Overall not a pleasant experience.
I really appreciate that they share feedback. But, the feedback I received, one of the points wasn't accurate. One of the interviewers asked me technical details about a project that was from over a year ago, which is not related at all to what I work on now. This was one of the reasons I was given that they were passing, but the way it was worded was "you worked for 2 years ... but had a really hard time explaining..." which sounded particularly harsh and unnecessarily rude. I didn't work on this project for 2 years, and I haven't touched it in over a year, which I had explained on the call.
The interviewers were otherwise kind but the interview experience makes me not want to work with this company in the future.