I interviewed with Lyst over 2 months starting in December 2021. I was in recruitment processes for multiple companies for similar roles so some of my description below of the interview process is relative to that of other companies.
First, their interview process was the longest. The stages were: Pre-screening, Take-home exercise, Pair-programming Call, Systems Design, Culture Call. So quite a large time investment needed, especially because Lyst was the only company to have a take-home for Senior positions.
The take-home was the Geektastic HighScoringWords exercise, which was fairly easy and handled by a third-party, so there are no comments or reviews that Lyst gives you directly about this stage. You either pass or fail it.
Next was the pair-programming call. Again, quite straightforward, and it was largely an exercise of showing you know how to use TDD to build up a class and function that retrieves data from a URL and saves it to disk. Interviewers were positive and helpful here with suggestions or discussion points raised in a friendly manner.
The last technical round was the systems design call, which was also positive. The question revolved around designing a system that could retrieve data from multiple unstandardised fashion supplier APIs and ingesting that data into the Lyst system. Here, I thought the interviewer was sufficiently impressed by the end of it, based on their feedback at the end of the call. But they did raise a minor "culture" issue, which was communicated to me at the end of all of the interview stages.
The final stage was the culture call. Classic questions like TMAT interacted with stakeholders, managing team structures day to day, disagreed with a coworker, refined requirements, etc. These are common questions asked at this stage, so come in with something rehearsed to regurgitate. And as this was for the senior role, there were questions that touched on that too.
For a company that focused heavily on the technical area of their employees, it is a shame to have not been given an offer at all due to minor culture call issues. It was a shame especially because their process was the longest out of all that I had taken part in. And paired with their relatively slow response times between stages, it meant the process dragged out for quite a long time. And on a final note, Lyst does not currently offer stocks or a bonus, therefore their total comp is entirely based on base salary, which itself was lower than most for roles at other companies.
I wouldn't personally bother with it unless you're deeply in love with the company and its goals.
