Applied online, no referral. Took about a month for them to get back to me. People on glassdoor are right, they ask "why forward" about 50 times throughout the interview process. Very friendly interviewers but many yellow flags throughout the process: 1) When asked about WFH flexibility, the interviewer mentions they worked from home before .... on weekends. They expect 5x/week with flex only for emergencies. 2) Low salaries. I never got to salary negotation, but take a look at levels.fyi and glassdoor and you'll see how woefully underpaid SWEs at Forward are. And don't forget to factor in commuting costs to their SF HQ. 3) Most importantly, the role says its for "Data Science" and "Computer Vision", but they clearly have no cohesive DS/ML/AI vision. More on that later. 1st round - Behavioural screen with a SWE (no HR rounds). Why foward? Diving into past experience, other companies you've applied for, what excites you about work. 2nd round - Tech screen. Pretty cool question about their body scanner and how you would determine certain human dimensions using it. Onsite - 3 rounds. Strangely, this is exactly the same as the onsite for other SWEs at Forward (i.e. design Google Docs, UI design, coding question has to do with JSON and OOP etc.) SWEs are Forward are generalists who can work on anything. Which is certainly cool, but not ideal if you're looking for a ML role. I asked what projects I'd be working on, ML initiatives etc. and the response I got was "that would be figured out later, once I onboard". It's clear Forward does not have a vision for ML. Despite all the negatives I still think the interview process was positive overall because of how friendly and collaborative the interviewers were throughout the whole process. Based on the cult-like nature of the company I expected a much worse process. Overall I got rejected on the onsite stage without any feedback, but I'm not surprised. I obviously don't know how to design Google Docs because I was looking for an SWE, ML / MLE role and had prepped for ML design-type interviews. Having said that, being a generalist SWE at Forward could be exciting given the dynamic nature of projects and the option to work on so many different areas. But you do have to be okay with low pay, 5x/week RTO, and poor WLB.