I got this interview because I applied to a different Alibaba opening on LinkedIn and automatically received an interview for this one. Before I got the interview, I actually noticed that an Alibaba recruiter had looked at my LinkedIn profile two or three times, about a week before the interview notice. Many Alibaba openings have nearly identical titles, so I spent a long time trying to work out which JD this one was. In the end I had an AI go through my messages and figure out which JD it most likely was. By then the JD was no longer on LinkedIn and had been scraped onto other sites.
This counts as the first-round interview, and it was scheduled for one hour. I picked a time that overlapped between China time and US Pacific time.
The whole development team is in China. They are mainly launching a product, or a service. The service is deployed in the US, so they need someone in the US to do that work and deploy it to their US data center. Probably because of recent policy restrictions, a service deployed in the US needs a person in the US to do it. The role: besides deploying the service, you also need to develop it. Although this team and this person are the only ones in the US office, there are sister teams that work the same way: a team in China, and one person in the US doing that team's work here. So the office is not just one person, there are other teams, and everyone works on the same product. My impression after the interview is that the interviewer read my resume very closely, including the things he cared about most, such as what telephone is used for, how it is used, and my experience using telephone, including the emergencies I ran into when deploying cloud services. That was what he cared about most. There were also monitoring questions: how do you set up monitoring, and what decisions do you actually run into with monitoring? At the end there was a coding question, which was a scenario question. You can't actually write code. It opens a dialog box and you chat with an AI about how to write it, but there is no way to write the code by hand, you can only talk to the AI. What they wanted to see was how you would use an AI agent to debug, and how you would talk to it.
It has been about ten days since the interview. I sent two follow-up emails, and a couple of days ago I saw an Alibaba recruiter look at my LinkedIn again, but I think they probably have better candidates.
I think the upside of this position is that it is an all-Chinese-speaking environment, and because your boss is not near you, you may get a lot of power and can do a lot of the things you want to do. The downside is that when there is an operations problem, only you can solve it, because the development team is in China and, due to regulatory limits, cannot touch the services deployed in the US, which could create legal risk. So this position carries a big share of the responsibility, and you would be on call.
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