My interview experience with Rounds in April 2026 was one of the most poorly managed processes I have encountered. While the initial recruiter screening was standard, the subsequent stages revealed a significant lack of internal coordination and respect for the candidate’s effort.
After the screening, I was assigned a complex home project with a strict 48-hour deadline. The task required building a scraper for Google Play, periodically taking screenshot of GP page of apps, implementing a dashboard to show timeline, and hosting the final product on a cloud provider (AWS/GCP). The company explicitly demanded a production-ready solution, which required several hours of intensive work to meet their high bars for code quality and deployment.
The most insulting part of the process was the technical interview with two engineers. Despite the significant time investment required for the home assignment, the interviewers failed to mention it once. There was zero discussion regarding the architecture, code, or the live demonstration I was told to prepare. Instead, the session was pivoted to a generic system design prompt, designing Tinder, which bore no relevance to the specialized task I had just completed.
It is unacceptable to require candidates to perform free labor under the guise of a "production-ready" assignment only to ignore that work entirely during the evaluation. This process is disjointed, disrespectful of professional boundaries, and suggests a deep-seated inefficiency within their engineering culture. I would strongly advise others to value their time and reconsider engaging with this firm.
