My Albertsons interview experience

Honored to have gotten an interview at Albertsons. The role was for a L2 SWE. It’s a bit of a down level from my current role as an L7 at Google, but the recruiter promised that my TC would be 50-100% higher. Because I had a referral from an existing employee and a Knuth dollar bill, I was invited directly to the on-site. They flew me out to Idaho and put me in a hotel with a beautiful view of the cornfields. On the morning of the interview, I had breakfast with the recruiter - I thought I was in for something fresh, and the fresh fruits and veggies in the cafe did not disappoint. I had 6 rounds of interviews. The first 4 were coding - each consisted of two LC Hards. One of the interviews require writing out the solution in assembly - this is like Amazon’s “bar raiser” round and was quite tough even though the recruiter had advised about this before. There was one behavioural round with the last 20 minutes reserved for brain teasers, and a final system design and implementation round where you had to design a system and get it running on a cloud provider of your choice in 75 minutes. I ran out of time at the end for all but 2 of these interviews. The recruiting team was very responsive - I received my rejection the same day, but they did give me a $750 gift card which should cover my grocery shopping for the next few months. When I got home, they had also mailed me some of the very good O Organics, Soleil, and Open Nature goodies, which should last me a few weeks. Bummed to not get an offer, but I expected this going in.