Intercom Staff Software Engineer interview questions

Applied online and was contacted by a recruiter working at Intercom for a screening call. Was invited to a first Virtual Onsite with a cultural assessment and technical project review. After over a week of radio silence, despite being promised an answer the same or next day, I was notified via automated email (no personal message), that I made it to the final stage. Virtual Offsite consisted of 4 parts and taking 4-5 hours total: Role Execution, Growing Capacity, Technical Design and Role Chat. First one was described as “deep dive into a gnarly technical challenge you have encountered in a past”, one interviewer showed up 10-15 minutes late due to a fire alarm and asked maybe 1-2 questions. I felt the interviewers weren’t interested in probing about my experience, even though they might not have gotten the insight they were looking for with that single problem from almost 5 years ago. Growing capacity was about how I grew team performance in the past, and about mentoring. Technical design was a database design challenge with a serious of product requirements. Role chat was an opportunity to interview Intercom. I also had a final chat with the recruiter with the possibility of starting as Senior Engineer, since Intercom’s Staff role is different than at other companies. After about 4 business days, I received a call from the recruiter, saying they didn’t want to make an offer, not even for Senior Engineer, because I had worked alone a lot, and they work differently at Intercom, and that it might have been because I have interviewed at Staff level and it would’ve been different if I applied for Senior (I learnt about their specific structure during the first virtual onsite). All in all, very disappointed with the experience due to the outcome and feedback, as they haven’t even tried to assess my working in teams (I built a whole Cloud Engineering team from scratch), as they were not asking about anything but the “gnarly technical problem” when looking for leadership qualities and my technical experience was very strong. It almost feels as if you already have to be the perfect candidate when interviewing and anything specific, especially ways of working that is inherently unique to each company is nothing that you can adapt to on the job.