I applied online. I interviewed at Isomorphic Labs
Interview
There seemed to be a mismatch in alignment between what was expected as part of the role and the actual interview process from the very start. The company recruiters I worked with did not seem to give me a clear answer on what to expect from any of the interviews. Why would you ask irrelevant Leetcode style Coding questions to ML engineers and vice versa?
I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Isomorphic Labs (London, England) in Sept 2024
Interview
I had a pleasant initial HR screen and was invited to complete a two-part take-home assignment, with the HR representative assuring me that I’d receive feedback on my application regardless of the outcome.
The assignment, however, was unnecessarily complex and ended up taking approximately 20 hours of my time. The first part focused on pandas data transformations (PCA), while the second part delved heavily into transformers and advanced ML concepts.
A week later, I received a generic rejection letter addressing me as [INTERVIEWER'S NAME], with no feedback provided as promised. Despite cross-referencing my work with bio-researchers and other ML engineers, I couldn’t identify any errors in my solution.
While the bar for landing a job here is clearly high, it’s hard not to feel disappointed at the lack of transparency or respect for candidates’ time. Surely, they could have reached the same conclusion without requiring such an extensive commitment.
Thanks for sharing your experience, and for bringing this to our attention. We're looking into what happened here, as you should have been offered the opportunity to receive feedback on your take home task. Please can you contact our Talent Acquisition team (talent-acquisition@isomorphiclabs.com) and we'll be happy to help with this.
5 interview rounds in total: take home assignment, coding, HM interview, ML debugging, behavioral. The difficulty was just right and interviewers were mostly open and friendly. Unfortunately, ML debugging felt a bit more stressful and exam-like to me, which made me more hesitant than I should have been.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Take home assignment asks to implement simple EDA for a pandas dataset
Thank you for sharing your experience. We'll take this feedback onboard and look into what happened in the Debugging interview, as we usually try to do what we can to put everyone at ease. I'm glad that the rest of the process went well, and hope that you might consider reapplying again in the future.
Bowls
Get actionable career advice tailored to you by joining more bowls.
Want the inside scoop on your own company?
Check out your Company Bowl for anonymous work chats.