The interview process is very involved and long, but to Stytch's credit, they moved quickly through each phase. Starting with a phone screening with their recruiter, it moved onto a 30 minute chat with the engineering manager, then a 1 hour presentation on a project for two engineers, then a 1 hour code-on-screen challenge, then a 1 hour "design a system" challenge, then a 1 hour cultural fit/behavioral interview and a 30 minute "value alignment" chat with the CTO. The process was straight forward, all interviewers friendly and patient and positive feedback was given the whole way through. Because the database engineer role is a new position at the time of writing this review, I'm unsure of how relevant all questions or challenges were to the role but I'm sure the interviewers were given as much preparation as they needed to ask good questions and make sense of the answers provided.
As another review here reported, the recruiter sent me a request to connect on LinkedIn the night before sending the rejection email. I'm unclear on what led to their decision, but I'm sure they found another candidate that was more experienced or qualified.
Having been on the other side of the interview process for this type of position, I would have cut the code challenge and brought more focus to the questions: asking about terraform, database-specific problems and features, optimization, scaling in AWS etc. This felt more like a general software engineering interview rather than one for a database engineering position and in my experience, that can be misleading for the candidate. A sentiment that was repeated throughout the process was that they were looking for good people rather than someone that was strong in every aspect of a role. I did ask the recruiter I worked with if there was anything I could do to jeopardize an offer and it was indicated that using "I" language and highlighting accomplishments I was solely responsible for was the best strategy in the end-interviews. If you worked on a team in your previous roles, this advice may mean reword your successes in such a way that it sounds like you were driving these accomplishments separately from your teammates.
