I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Unbabel (Lisbon, Lisbon District) in Mar 2019
Interview
First call with the recruiter, we talked mainly about the company's culture. (30 minutes)
After that, I was given a homework challenge with a 7-day deadline. The challenge was not very difficult to meet, but it took me some time to complete it properly, as they asked me for a detailed report.
Once the challenge was over, a second interview was held with a site reliability engineer, they asked me about my latest professional experiences, about the challenge, they were very satisfied with my work. The interview was very positive and lasted about 60 minutes.
The final interview was with the principal engineer, the interview lasted no more than 45 minutes. The interlocutor seemed in a hurry and this did not make me comfortable during the process. The question was about troubleshooting the infrastructure, I answered most of them. At the end of the interview, I asked a question about the part of the time that could be spent on software development for a site reliability engineer. He decided to give me a new challenge to test my development skills, which I accepted.
The last challenge was about data science, I was no exception, as my training in infrastructure engineering and development skills were mainly oriented towards scripting or API development.
I finally finished the challenge, I wasn't very confident in my work but I was very curious to at least get the solution excepted.
I received the classic answer from the recruiter who said that it wasn't the perfect match, blah, blah.......
She also told me that I could get a more detailed feedback, if I want. (Of course I want to! I barely worked 3 days on challenges at home.)
Here is the mail response from the company in all its integrity: "I had the feeling that your challenge was not so strong, so the team would prefer not to go ahead with you for the role of SRE."
Seriously?
I have had a lot of fun dealing with these challenges and I do not regret every minutes taking them, because I learned new things. I just found that it is a total lack of respect for candidates to not provide any feedback regarding the time they have spent so far.
So before you interview at Unbabel, be clear with yourself that you will never get feedback from your work.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Could you explain to me what SLO and SLA stand for?