Recruiter reached out on LinkedIn and we had an initial phone conversation and intro interview with the team lead. Next, there was a Leetcode-style coding interview with an engineer on the team; the web-based software was buggy and kept disconnecting, but otherwise it all went well. Friendly folks so far. Next, they invited me to the final step: a 4 interview "loop" similar to big tech. First was a coding exercise with an engineer, very similar to the first interview with the same buggy software, but fairly easy if you've done Leetcode stuff before. Second loop interview was a conversation on systems design with an engineer. I thought I did OK at this, but the guy who interviewed me was extremely socially awkward, which is fine, but I just couldn't get much indication out of him of how it was going or what he wanted. They said I didn't do quite as well on this one. Third interview was just a standard behavioral interview with some friendly PMs, and fourth was a troubleshooting interview, just talking about steps to diagnose and solve various problems in a large software system spread across multiple stores (important to remember scalability if you do one of these). The recruiter had been pretty good up to this point, giving advice and actively communicating. He got back to me a week later and said because of the systems design interview, they couldn't offer me the job I was applying for, but since my coding was good, they would likely give me an offer for another team if I just did one more quick behavioral interview with them. I said that was fine, and I was told I'd hear back in 24-48 hours. A few days later, nothing, so I inquired with the recruiter. A few days after, he emails me to say "I'll call you tomorrow." It's been a few weeks now, and I've tried to call and email with no response whatsoever. He doesn't pick up his phone or reply back. If there wasn't an offer anymore, he should just say so, not claim there was one and then never respond again. This sort of behavior from companies should really be illegal, and the whole thing appears to have been a waste of time now. So in short, don't bother with this company if you don't want to get ghosted after a final interview.