Worst interview experience I've had.
Process: Got contacted on December 14th to schedule a first interview with the manager of the hiring team. Got asked why AI agents fail to be implemented in a corporate setting and behavioral questions about handling difficult requirements.
Second stage was with a senior member, had to remind the recruiter for 3 straight weeks about the interview, seemed like they forgot, or went with other candidates and were waiting to see if they failed. When finally contacted got told to provide availability for the same week. Questions: explain what is kvcache, explain in detail flashattention, principles of reinforcement learning, patterns for MCP servers, about my research as well.
Third stage "Superday":
NY (around mid march 3 months since starting) Originally got 7 back to back interviews scheduled. The day before, 2 senior management got their interviews cancelled, including two key stakeholders for the role (direct "future" manager, and senior manager from ventures). Replaced with junior member of a sister team (which hints that either they hired another candidate by that time or that they are really disorganized, which is worse).
Day of the interview:
1st interview: Explain about your research, questions about kvcache management, context management and prior experience with agentic frameworks.
2nd interview, coding, got asked about iterators, but the interviewer did not accept any of my solutions even when later told me that prior steps were correct (kept contradicting himself). That technical interview felt like I was trying to convince the interviewer that the solution was correct, with him questioning every single choice I made, (interviewer kept repeating that he needed a "live" system, but when tried to pivot to infra serving and how to scale basically he stated that that part was not the purpose of the exercise) It was on a whiteboard. Very broad question about price outlier prediction but scoped in such a manner that the problem seem to be about serving, infra, different ml algorithms and statistics. At the end the interviewer told me that he wanted a for loop to consume the iterator with a grin laughing at me (literally while shaking my hand he told me "hope that was not very painful".
4th interview: Never showed up, did not even cancel the interview, they just told me to wait for him (they "tried" rescheduling 3 times none of which he showed up)
5th interview: Senior Infra manager who fell asleep while asking me about my experiences (yes, not a joke, he fell asleep for a few seconds and then got up and started drinking water). That one is on me I guess, I bored the manager so bad that I made him fall asleep in an interview that lasted 15mins.
5th interview, senior engineer, got asked to explain my research using the whiteboard. While also telling me that none of that was going to be used on any point of the job.
6th interview, product manager, seem like a good person, had at least the decency to look at my resume and ask thoughtful questions. Mind that at that point I was completely demoralized so did not put a lot of effort.
Would recommend strictly applying for quant roles. The company seems to be really toxic and hostile towards mid-junior tenure folks. Maybe is the fact that they have so many candidates, will never know.
