Summary : Nice interview experience, got the offer letter but did not join due to super bad reviews about the company across the internet. Each and every interview round, even the CEO, warns you of a very intensive work culture(words to shroud a toxic work culture). Many Reddit, Ambition Box and Glassdoor reviews will paint a picture that there is abig red flag hidden behind that lucrative pay. Recruiters told me there is a 45 day sprint that they do where everyone works 9 to 9 and even WFH on weekends.

Interview Experience :

Initial Recruiter Meet :
Meeting with Recruiter over Google Meet. Got asked why looking I am for a change and at what scale(I am guessing it relates to my work in Backend) at which I have worked. Then, to my surprise, the recruiter started thorwing random college/placement level CS questions at me, which I could easily explain. Round went well.
Ex : Difference between TCP/UDP, SQL/NoSQL etc

Technical Round 1 :
Round taken by a SDE III. Funny enough, I got mostly the same questions as the previous round, seems almost as if they had some sheet of questions prepared. Also got asked a question about indexes in database and what will happen if we index every column. Answered it, but not satisfactorily. Next DSA problem with partial implementation of core logic : LRU Cache. Solved with ease and moved to next round.

Technical Round 2 :
This round was with DOE( Director of Engineering). This was the most unsual round and some Reddit posts can explain you why( I had a good experience overall though). One wierdly interesting question that the DOE will ask you is How much will you rate yourself in hardwork on a scale of 1-10 (Correct answer is 10, but no points cut for saying 8 I guess). I consider these questions be silly (but does clearly show what level of commitment towards your work does the company ask of you). Finally, we move to System Design (Requirements, Rest API and Model Design only) of Quora. I did fairly in this round as I have little experience in System Design. But I passed this round since I came up with pretty good answers I suppose.

CEO Round :
The CEO Saket Modi lives in California. I would say he is quite famous since a Google/Youtube Search will give loads of information about him. This round is totally about Culture at Safe(and they have a super long culture deck) and I was advised time and time again to go through the culture deck(I wish the interviews were tougher in their technical aspects rather than all this). The CEO round also went well and he himself gave confirmation of my selection.

Offer Letter Received! 🎉
However, I had to turn down due to the scary nature of reviews about this company Although I am a super hard-working person, the days I want WLB, I want it no questions asked. And I felt it would be tough here. 😟

Note to myself and my fellow engineers/developers :

This was a very lucrative offer for me in terms of pay and a change of role/tech stack. However, we sometimes lose ourselves amidst all this and forget that life is a marathon and not a sprint. There is more to life than work and if you think a role might take your personal time at the benefit of more money, trust me , as a friend, as a brother or as a well wisher, it will not be worth it.

Compensation Breakup : https://leetcode.com/discuss/compensation/5949029/Safe-Security-or-SDE-1