Prove interview questions

There were a number of interviews - phone screening, hiring manager, peer, leadership of another team, executive interview, and finally a mock QBR. 6 is a lot of interviews but seems like the standard recently. The questions were fair and nothing crazy to note.

I was approached by a recruiter and invited to apply online. The interview process consisted of several stages: an initial recruiter screening, followed by rounds with the Hiring Manager, a System Design interview (specific to the SRE role), a Coding round, and finally a Panel interview. Overall, the process was quite time-consuming and, at times, disorganized. Coming from a company about 500 times the size of Prove, I’ve been through structured and rigorous interview processes before — which made some of the inconsistencies here stand out more sharply. The Hiring Manager round was a general conversation to assess experience alignment and fit. The System Design round was the most solid part of the process — the only round where the interviewer seemed truly prepared, engaged, and technically competent. The discussion was relevant to the role and allowed for meaningful back-and-forth. The Coding round involved a relatively simple LeetCode-style problem. However, the interviewers (2 people) appeared junior and lacked depth in their understanding, making it difficult to have a more technical or insightful conversation. The Panel interview was the most disappointing. It included four interviewers who seemed unprepared and disengaged. They mostly read off my CV, asked vague and repetitive questions (many of which had already been covered in the Hiring Manager round), and offered little interaction. One of them asked about Kubernetes CRDs (Custom Resource Definitions) but without any context, which felt like a random buzzword check rather than a meaningful topic. The energy in the room was noticeably tense — it felt as if the panel had just had a disagreement before the interview began, and the dynamic made the experience uncomfortable. I followed up with the recruiter post-interview but received only a generic response saying they had decided to proceed with another candidate. My impression is that they may be looking for a very narrow skillset match. If so, it would be more respectful and efficient to filter candidates out during the initial screening instead of having them go through multiple rounds unnecessarily. This experience raised concerns for me about the internal team dynamics and the overall quality of their interview process.