- Was contacted by a recruiter and asked to apply (red flag #1) - Intro call with recruiter, which went well. Very nice person. - Technical assessment (this was alarmingly easy, and I consider it red flag #2) - Meeting with senior engineering team. Very nice people, but it became more and more clear that there was no real SRE/DevOps presence in the department, and they were looking for someone to lead that domain alongside another senior engineer, who seems like more of a sys-admin type. Red flag #3. - In this call, the senior engineers expressed that there would be flexibility regarding the time zone difference (I'm west coast, they're east coast). I was feeling pretty good about the role at this point, even with the misgivings detailed above. - Meeting with executive team. Some of the people on the call were okay, but certain employees seemed really unpleasant, and made a weird point to try to "intimidate me", which didn't work. They placed a strange emphasis on how they had multiple hires join, and quickly leave (red flag # 4). - In this call, they also set a lot of expectations that the role would be really intense and require a lot of ownership/grit/extra hours, and that working hours starting at 7am were mandatory for my time zone. Red flag #5. - Next call was from the COO, who made me the offer, but spent a bizarre amount of time going over the benefits, like he was postponing telling me the salary, which makes sense, as the salary was more commensurate with a junior SRE, but the job clearly had the expectations of a senior/principal. When I said that the offer was lower than I expected, they offered a $5k salary bump after 6 months, which I have very little faith would have actually materialized. Red flags #6 and #7. In summary, the executive team seemed to have an "ask not what your country can do for you" attitude, regarding a role that had a lot of demands, no senior SREs to provide mentorship, and a relatively low salary to boot.