After initially contacted by Hinge leadership, I first talked about the position with the CTO. After a good initial conversation where he described what the position entailed and the engineering challenges he sent me a data engineering project. The project was open-ended and took me some time to complete. While it was longer than most, it was interesting because it allowed me to work on something real world and let me use some paradigms that I had wanted to try. After submitting the project, I was asked to come in for an on-site interview fairly quickly. I was given a sheet with what to expect with a Hinge interview. The actual interview stuck closely to the prep provided. We went over my background, I was asked to design a general data pipeline, I was asked questions that were related to the culture at Hinge. I really liked some of the "non-traditional" aspects of the interview; there were multiple people in the room, the culture interview was prepared thoroughly and not random "where do you see yourself" type of questions. It showed me how much the team really cared about bringing in people that would be a good fit for the organization.