Contacted by a recruiter via LinkedIn.
Process consisted of recruiter phone screen, Sr. Manager phone screen, then a take home coding assessment that didn't take more than a few hours.
Next stage consisted of a longer technical interview with 8 members of the team including the Sr. Manager, other Managers, and Sr. or Principal Engineers. Questions consisted of culture fit, work history, technical questions, the take home assessment, and I had 3 live coding challenges. I really enjoyed meeting this group and thought the interviews were fine, but I know I did not do well on the live coding challenges so was not expecting to move forward. The whole process remained straightforward only up until this point.
Later, the recruiter contacted me afterwards and let me know they wanted to move forward with me as a 'special case' and how 'lucky I was' to be moving forward. I kept getting unclear, avoidant answers on what the 'special case' offer would look like despite asking explicitly multiple times. Despite this, I really liked the technical group of people I had met and decided to take a chance and move forward with another 'special case' round of interviews. This consisted of two 30-minute calls with the VP of the department and a manager from the technical interview who would be my hiring manager. I thought both meetings were fine, but I got a strong sense that both parties including myself were unclear on what the meetings were for.
Got an offer, but it turns out it was for a spot on their Software Engineering team instead of their Senior team, which I might have been fine with given my performance on the live challenges, had the recruiter been more straightforward with me from the beginning. Instead, I got consistently inconsistent and evasive answers throughout the whole process and felt the recruiter was rushing me to sign the offer. Ended up deciding to not move forward with this company.
