I interviewed for a joint position between Smartly and a small, recently acquired subsidiary of theirs named Viralspace. I was greeted with a screening video call with Smartly's recruiter and Viralspace's CTO and had a great conversation. There was a take-home frontend project for Viralspace that was honestly just the right amount of work involved. With a design guide and animated gifs the job was to use React to re-create the features and behaviors. No back-end involved. It was provided in JavaScript but I took the time to convert the incomplete initial project to TypeScript. I managed to impress with the project and was paired with an engineering manager from Smartly. They asked if I would want to have front-end or back-end covered, and I chose front-end. I found the interview (not the interviewer) to be particularly annoying and frustrating as the questions involved describing the design of a front-end project - literally, like asking me to describe how I would arrange the directories for components, CSS, types, utilities, caches, central state/context. It was like asking a car designer to describe, in concrete details, a good car they would make. After that frustrating line of questioning, they proceeded to ask about subjects that were the realm of team leads, if not managers. Asking me what steps I would take to organize a 100-person engineering team, or at least prepare for it (answer they were looking for: internal, versioned node module packages). I could tell the questions were made to make me uncomfortable and see if I would flounder and crack. But in truth I saw the writing on the wall that Smartly needs a capital-S Senior developer to help the (as my impression told me) a very youthful team at Viralspace. Despite the drubbing I felt I received in the Smartly interview portion I was invited to speak with two of the founders of Viralspace and their number one engineer. It was the cultural fit portion and I don't remember too many specifics about it. But be sure to fill out and memorize your table of STAR questions and be ready to talk about a time you failed and how you handle conflict and other fun stuff like that. Nice crew, I was genuinely interested in working with them. I was told a few days later they had chosen someone else. I understood, I was presenting myself honestly as something of a "mid-senior" full stack engineer and I had the impression they needed an experienced hand.