Process (5 rounds): Hiring Manager screen → Take-home project → Take-home extension → CTO interview → CEO interview The Good: The hiring manager was technically sharp, deeply familiar with the Android stack, and genuinely pleasant to talk with. The take-home project was unusually well-designed — working directly with production code — which showed respect for the candidate's time and gave a realistic preview of the work. Strong alignment on technical direction and architecture decisions. The Concerns: The CTO interview was a significant departure in tone. Several questions felt more like challenges than genuine inquiry, and some came across as unnecessarily aggressive for a professional interview setting. More substantively, the engineering culture raised flags. The CTO described a workflow of 20–30 PRs per day across multiple codebases using AI tooling. When asked about code quality practices, the response framed human review as the bottleneck rather than a feature. For a 13-person team owning a large, cross-platform product, that approach to velocity over quality gave me pause — particularly for a sole-platform engineer role where you'd be responsible for long-term maintainability. Takeaway: Great product, strong HM, and a modern tech stack. But if engineering culture and code quality practices matter to you, come prepared to ask pointed questions about how quality is maintained at speed. The answer you get will tell you a lot. At the end, I opted to not continue to the CEO round.

2 technical chats 1 take home project - build a UI component in an android app that's fully functional 1 live coding extension - navigate to a new screen based on the previous UI component 3 culture fit chats