Pros: The recruiter was professional, highly communicative, and pleasant to deal with throughout the scheduling process.
Cons: Complete lack of alignment between HR and the hiring panel. Total disrespect for candidate time and pre-arranged interview structures.
Interview Review:
I interviewed for an Associate Director of Data Engineering role. Because I had been out of hands-on coding for a couple of years, HR and I explicitly agreed that a live technical presentation would be the best way to evaluate my high-level architecture and problem-solving skills, rather than trivial syntax recall. I spent hours preparing a comprehensive pipeline presentation.
When I arrived, the interview panel (a Director and Senior Engineer) completely ignored the agreed-upon agenda. They refused to let me present my work until the final 10 minutes. Instead, they spent 50 minutes asking entry-level, low-level coding questions (e.g., how to read a CSV file) completely mismatched for an Associate Director position.
Despite multiple requests to focus on the presentation we had agreed to review, they persisted with their own agenda. To top it off, their office tech and WiFi failed, and the HDMI didn't work for the final 5 minutes anyway.
HR later passed along feedback that I "lacked fundamental knowledge" because I was unprepared for an entry-level trivia pop-quiz that breached our prior agreement. Complete waste of time and total degradation of trust. If you value your time, be very careful with this engineering team.