I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Citian (Washington, DC) in Mar 2026
Interview
Warning - This company ghosts a lot, as also confirmed by other interviews.
Initial recruiter screen call, followed by a technical assessment.
This was followed by an interview with the Lead Data Scientist and VP on Engineering but the VP never showed up to the interview. Recruiter and everyone else ghosted and never replied, even after following up.
I applied online. I interviewed at Citian (Washington, DC)
Interview
I only spoke with a recruiter and decided not to continue. Their compensation is on the lower end for startups and they value years of experience which is unusual, but they seem like good people and have interesting work. Very transparent
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Do you have experience with cloud, tell me about your background, pretty standard recruiter questions
The take-home assessment is a full day or 2 of work in 1-3 hours, with no allowances for LLMs to write syntax. I understand how an element of restriction on the latter is necessary to make sure the candidate is not "faking it" but I'm sure there are other avenues to do this. For example my assessment looked for: an optimized ETL job (Airflow DAG), well-documented SQL schema and dbt data model, and "bonus points" for Docker orchestration of all the above. Respectfully to just get ghosted I'm not sure who will do this let alone successfully while just googling the boilerplate code...
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
End-to-end data pipeline and basic infrastructure in 1-3 hours without AI tooling
