athenahealth Software Engineer interview experience

First came an online assessment, then a more technical coding interview where I mostly worked through LeetCode-style easy-to-medium problems plus some database-related queries. That round was followed by a system design interview, and that’s where things didn’t go in my favor.

Across the technical parts, the difficulty felt average overall, but what I noticed was how rigid the expectations were. In the system design stage especially, the interviewer seemed to be looking for very specific approaches they had in mind, and when I didn’t mirror the exact path they expected, I was shut down