Recently I underwent an interview loop with Attentive.ai for SDE3 role.
There's little to no info on this firm online given it's a very niche startup.

Here the loop

• Couple of month ago some outsourcing firm reached, shared details went silent, after sometime again some other firm reached out with same profile.
• Finally after ~1 month company recruiter reached out. Talked about role and my experience. Scheduled a 15min chat with HM.
• Call got reschuled for some days, did the intro with HM, basic past experience chat and about firm and role
• A tech screening round was scheduled with HDIP(third party service)
• 1 hr round with 2 problem, can use any online/offline IDE and language with no auto complete/auto suggestion. Problem 1: 2 sum, Problem 2: LRU cache - both ran with custom test case
• Cleared this one, LLD was scheduled
• This was about notification system, started with acc. to book then went deep with each component and exploring other approaches for shared solution. Basically grilling on solution and how to handle different use case/failures.
• It was 1.5hr, 1 hr discussion with entities and logic, 30mins was coding the working solution using any AI tool.
• Since I only been using chatGPT for prep, went ahead with this. Panel was hesistant on my choice and repeated to explore other tools. I still went ahead with GPT(I think I rubbed the panel there!!!).Shared working code
• Recruiter came back with feedback and downleved to SDE2 asked if I would be fine with it. I went ahead anyway just to see how this ends. Revised comp expectations was also discussed, HLD scheduled
• This was the most frustating round I ever did, it was re-scheduled atleast 4-5 times and sometimes just 20-30mins before round. This kind of management totally broke the momentum and my will to explore this further, still went ahead and gave 1.5hr round
• It was to design a live stream chat service, focus on durablility, near real time message delivery, discussed SQL/NOSQL, event streaming, CDC. Messed up not mentioning web socket for the given scale. Post panel hint talked about socket, exposing kafka stream to end user via some middleware(this being socket layer which I forgot to mentioned and messed up)

Recrutier asked about my experience after few days and a rejection mail arrived. More than 3 weeks went down the drain(t_t). I wonder had the process been any more smoother where could I have been?. I think of it as me having bad luck with this firm and move on

P.S: If you ever get into such situations, never beat yourself up, reflect on loop, try to get points on improving urself and keep on GRINDING!!!, onto next loop