Applied online and connected with a super nice recruiter. She helped to arrange three rounds of interviews: 1. Chat with hiring manager General motivational questions for 30 mins, James was super lovely and I could see myself working with him. 2. Coding Challenge with an engineer TypeScript coding challenge with an engineer, very simple question, lasted for 45 mins. The engineer was super nice too. 3. Final round of technical/non-technical interviews with multiple people in the team This part was where I wasn't even sure if I wanted to work for them for multiple reasons. There were four rounds: Coding Challenge(TypeScript) with two senior members of the team; Development Cycle Interview with hiring manager and a product manager; System Design interview with two other senior members of the team; motivational/team fit interview. I could appreciate the structure of the interviews but I failed to see what they really wanted to see in me ... the coding challenge was more to refactor the code (which was very messy) to make it more reusable, etc. I felt that given the nature of Zoa as a company I'd spent lots of time going through other people's messy code if I did get hired. I wasn't sure the product manager was experienced enough really to work with developers. Then the worst was the system design interview. The lady who "helped" me throughout the interview was passive aggressive in the end and being an architect myself I'm not sure she understood lots of the concerns I brought up. All in all I came out of the interview knowing I'd be rejected but felt very indifferent of the outcome as I knew I woudn't like to work for them. But I did LOVE the recruitment team and the hiring manager, they had made the whole process so much more enjoyable !

The process consisted of roughly 7 calls, with four "final" interviews for System Design, Dev Cycle, Coding and Skip Level. It's more interview steps than typical companies of this size, but they do their best to group as many together on the same day. They are paying above market rate with good benefits, so it's understandable why the process is a bit more drawn out than others. I found out the decision a week after my final interview. The entire process took around a month from initial application to final decision. Despite not quite demonstrating enough to get an offer at the level I applied, they offered a 15 minute session to give some detailed feedback from each of the interviews about areas I was stronger and weaker in, which was very much appreciated.