Intercontinental Exchange Backend Engineer interview experience

A big portion of the conversation was dominated by them talking about how they were needlessly re-creating software when there were already strong off-the-shelf or open-source options available. Then the focus shifted to how brittle their custom setup was, with a repeated theme of asking whether I could fix a version that kept breaking in production.

The whole journey felt skewed toward firefighting their existing system and arguing about design decisions more than evaluating my ability to build or reason through engineering fundamentals. I didn’t leave feeling like I had a fair shot—more