Not a process I would recommend. The interviews were technically interesting, but the evaluation felt inconsistent and very very unfair. Different stages communicated different expectations, and the final rejection feedback did not match the actual system design discussion at all. The interviewer explicitly moved rapidly across multiple unrelated topics as part of the format, yet the final feedback later claimed that "edge cases, trade-offs, and scalability considerations had to be introduced by the interviewer". That was not an accurate reflection of the discussion, where I had proactively covered scalability, Kafka/outbox, retry/idempotency, transaction modeling, reconciliation, multi-tenancy, and partial failure handling. The process gave the impression of subjective calibration and retrofitted feedback rather than a clear, transparent senior engineering evaluation. Based on my experience, candidates should think very carefully before investing significant time in this process, as the time investment may not be treated with the same level of fairness and consistency.

The interview didn't go smoothly and took quite long. After home assignment submition, got nothing updated from the team and neither the HR, who approached me via Linkedin. After about over a week of waiting, I considered to ask the HR when I can get the result about it and the answer is the reviewer on vacation. And finally after 2 weeks of waiting, I got the feedback from HR with the feedback from someone with the title "code reviewer". Almost of those feedback and comments are incorrect and misunderstanding :D. They even cannot understand how the code works. I think they didn't look at the codes and do any tests at all. Feedback quality is very poor and most of comments are pretty general and didn't address or take a specified case to describe and prove the reviewer's words. Something comment like problem with DB, or no clean packing, or single responsibility classes...etc While I restructured whole project, have used logical grouping with clear naming conventions. Each of model has own repository, service, controller packings and everything are testable and scalable. A little worries about the reviewer's skills :). I have a same feeling with the previous feedback, that this company at the moment is not good to apply. By the way, the final result is not surprise to me. Because I can feel they're not ready spend money for talented people based on salary discussion from the beginning with HR. People who accept the cheap salary comparing labor market in Finland may be employed.