Great initial chat with the recruiter and - from the description - a well thought out process that - from experience - is showing teething problems. Process starts with a take home assignment, to paraphrase the recruiter 'just a really messy terraform file that badly needs refactoring'. They're a small startup that have found a wonderful product market fit and is growing rapidly. I offered 20 years of industry experience including finance (PCI-DSS and SOX compliance), over a decade of building and managing infrastructure at startups turning unicorns, operating at Internet scale, using all the tech mentioned in the job ad, established in distributed teams and with remote work. It felt a great match and that I'd hit the ground running. Application was rejected though, reviewers raised concerns regarding 'design choices', 'ease of use' and 'difficulty of following multiple abstractions and layers of indirection'. All that found in couple hundred lines worth of terraform manifests, code which was suppose to serve as a basis for a technical discussion with the engineers. For a moment I thought they were joking ;) I'm assuming this to be a complete misunderstanding. If you decide to apply do ensure good understanding and alignment in regard to where you're coming from, their needs and your career goals. Godspeed!.. :)