had 1 interview with sr staff. In the interview I completed systems design and tradeoffs. Also had a coding assignment at the end which i succesfully completed. I was completely baffled when I was not selected to move forward since I answered all questions with thorough and complete answers on the system design and completed the coding challenge in the remaining 10 minutes of the interview.

Lengthy, involved, and overall mostly meaningless. They will make you do 2 companies worth of interviewing, to essentially decide on a gut feeling like any other company. Starts with an HR interview to assess fit, and make promises about how differently sprout handles their interview process, and to be fair I'd say the recruiter was one of the better ones I had worked with, very informed and informative. First stage technical screen is with an engineer at the level you are looking to be hired at, it's a coding session and a system Design question (get ready for a pattern) The coding session is done in a whiteboard style system where no running or compiling is possible. I think its a leetCode medium, I got determine if two arrays have the same elements. Next they require you to do a very time intensive take home coding challenge. Do the basics, (make sure you meet the requirements), because they don't care much beyond that, it was never brought up in the in person, the claim to do review it anonymously but it doesn't seem like it was anything other than a hurdle placed to weed out folks who aren't willing to put up with a 16ish hour long coding assessment. (google around for sprout social coding challenge, you will find it) Next is the onsite(virtual) its one half hour question answering session, followed by 3 hour long sessions of 2 engineers per session, taking turns to ask you their own system design question. Yep, you meet with 7 people, and do 6 questions, each lasting 25 minutes. The coding is again done in a non-coding environment like a google doc. All system design questions are open-ended, and suspect purposefully impossible to complete in 25 minutes. One session is a mix of system design and a series of behavioral questions, tell me a time when .... Don't worry these are done by managers, and I get the sense they are largely ignored by the principal/staff engineers unless it's a really bad answer. After all these data points they have on you now, it turns out regardless of how you do on the Tech screen, coding, the tech screen system design, the Take home challenge, and the 4 System Designs, and Behavioral and Algorithm question ... It all pretty much comes down to the two or three most senior folks on the interview panel. With any luck they will like the way you solved their pet interview question, with them judging your "coding"ability via a hurried excercise in blank google doc that you have to fill in remaining 5 minutes you have after the 20 minutes of system design discussion you started with. Overall a frustrating yet commonplace gut-judgement, after all the thought put in place by this company clearly as an attempt to make it a well informed process, it seems the hiring team largely is just doing whatever they feel like when it comes on saying yes or no. So why go through all this other crap... Overall it seems like a successful company, with a good culture, that essentially has been diluted by their own success, into thinking they are solving Amazon or Google level scale problems, when essentially they are just scraping Small to Medium business Twitter feeds.... They talked a good game but ended up imho as seeming disingenuous in their evaluation, and kool-aid gulping their elevated opinion of themselves.