DevOps at a Dublin cloud company: a Slack message from a former colleague was the entire process
Two weeks. Three rounds. One offer. The fastest hire I've ever been involved in, on either side of the table. I wasn't job-hunting. I'd been at my previous company for two years as the second DevOps hire. I liked the team. The infrastructure was a mess, but a manageable mess, and I'd been making it less of one every quarter. A former colleague, someone I'd worked with five years earlier at a very different company, had moved to a Dublin cloud company eight months prior as the engineering manager for the platform team. We'd stayed loosely in touch. On a Monday morning in late autumn he pinged me on Slack: "we're hiring a senior DevOps person for my team, you'd be perfect for it, can we talk?" I said yes mostly out of curiosity. I had no plans to leave, but I was happy to hear what they were doing. The first call was him, forty-five minutes. No formal recruiter screen. He walked me through the team, the stack, the on-call rotation, the salary band, the team's biggest current pain (a Kubernetes upgrade that had been deferred for six months), and what they hoped to ship next quarter. By the end I had a clearer picture of the role than I'd had of any role I'd interviewed for in the previous year. Round two was the head of platform and one other senior engineer. Sixty minutes, structured as an "infrastructure design" conversation. They presented a real problem they were working through, how to handle blue-green deployment for a stateful service with a managed database, and asked me to think out loud. I'd thought about variants of it before. We disagreed on one specific point about traffic shifting, and the conversation got more interesting there. Round three was an "incident response" round with two engineers. They walked me through a real outage from two months earlier, slowly, runbooks open, and asked what I'd have done at each decision point. There were a few places I'd have gone differently. I said so. They were pleasant about it. The final round was twenty minutes with the CTO. He asked two real questions: what would make me leave a company, and what would make me leave this one specifically. I told him. The offer arrived the next morning. €82,000 base. Same as their advertised band, no negotiation needed, because they'd told me the band on the first call and asked specifically whether it worked for me. I'd said yes then. I said yes again now. The whole process, from first Slack message to signed offer, was fourteen days. It worked because every round was someone who'd actually read about me, had a clear question they wanted answered, and respected my time. The recruiter screen never happened. No take-home. No gimmicks. It was the best interview process I've ever been through, and I think the only reason it worked was that an internal person was vouching for me from minute one.