I applied online. I interviewed at Tigera (Vancouver, BC) in Feb 2026
Interview
45 minute call with a recruiter. 1 hour technical interview with an engineer on the team. 1 hour chat with the hiring manager.
There are several reasons for the negative review:
- The biggest one. The recruiter told me how it was important for the company to treat employees well. The hiring manager praised me during the chat 3 times for my different qualities. The a rejection. A rejection by itself is fine. But it was a standard rejection message. And when I asked the recruiter for any feedback, there was no reply at all - and it has been more than two weeks. The company doesn't seem to be willing to even provide feedback to people it considers remarkable.
- The mailing system for the company is configured weird. My emails to the recruiter and to the interviewing engineer resulted in a mailing error message. Apparently, Tigera's Google Workspace setup has some policies configured to reject incoming messages, which includes mine. So it is impossible to do something like confirming proposed interview times or rescheduling a call. I told about this to two people I talked to. Neither even reacted to that, my emails kept getting rejected. Had to confirm interview times by contacting the recruiter on Linkedin.
- The technical interview was weird:
= First there was a coding exercise. The interviewer introduced it as a "leetcode exercise" despite the recruiter not even mentioning leetcode interviews. While I had some in the past, such interviews can be failed easily - depending on the problem complexity - if you haven't been solving leetcode problems recently. So I believe that testing leetcode skills without letting your interviewee to prepare is a bad practice. Luckily, i was given a rather easy problem.
= Then I was asked about Kubernetes and Docker. That led nowhere, as I didn't have personal production experience with those, even if worked with Borg that Kubernetes is based on. I agree that me having hands-on experience with Kubernetes would have been better, but I never tried to hide my lack of personal experience with that specific tool.
= Then it was a bunch of encyclopedic knowledge questions - those you can answer without prior knowledge by googling for 10 minutes: "what is the difference between TCP and UDP", "what is a context window for LLMs" etc. As such, it felt like the interviewer was not interested in anything other than basic coding and Kubernetes + Docker, almost totally ignoring all other experience or useful skills that I have.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Tigera (Cork) in Jan 2026
Interview
* Initial conversation with Talent Acquisition to discuss background, role fit, and expectations.
* First technical screen over Zoom
* On-site interview loop at the Cork office, consisting of:
* Architecture and communication discussion around past projects and design decisions.
* General technical interview with a deeper dive into a technical questions and a collaborative coding exercise focused on problem-solving rather than tricks.
* Prior experience interview covering career history, team dynamics, and ways of working.
* Final interview with the CEO, focused on culture, values, leadership, personal motivations, and long-term alignment rather than purely technical topics.
* Clear communication throughout the process, with timely updates and transparency on next steps.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What is the difference between TLS and mutual TLS?
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Tigera
Interview
I was ghosted after being told I had cleared multiple interview rounds for a Senior Software Engineer position.
I completed the recruiter screening, hiring manager, and coding round and received an email late Friday evening (6:50 p.m.) stating that I had advanced and was expected to come on-site the following Monday.
I explained that I was in a different city and asked if the interviews could be held over Zoom, as part of the process was already remote.
I never received any response after that. It was extremely unprofessional to stop communication at that stage, especially after confirming my progression.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What are the two features of Calico?
Adding two large ints represented as strings