It was a surreal onsite experience.
I had practiced the phone-screen problem many times. It was the Google Sheets problem, and I finished it immediately.
The recruiter told me about an hour later that I had passed, then arranged the onsite.
There were three rounds.
For system design, I was asked to design an agent that scores a file according to a set of rules and labels it qualified, acceptable, or unqualified. For acceptable and unqualified files, it also had to provide suggestions for changes. We spent a long time discussing how to avoid conflicts when multiple agents were involved. I may have short-circuited here. In the end, it would have been enough to let one person make the changes.
For the deep dive, I discussed one project and was asked why its timeline had been tight.
For coding, I used Google Colab to build a bare-bones embedding/RAG system. I could not really tell what pain point the problem was trying to expose. The coding itself was not complicated. The last question asked how I would improve the evaluation, such as recall or hit rate.
What made me uncomfortable was that this was arranged as an in-person onsite. I drove for almost two hours early in the morning, arrived at the office, and waited in a meeting room for five minutes with nobody there. When I opened the Zoom link, I discovered the interviewer was not in the office. I waited another five minutes for the second round, and that interviewer was not in the office either. One interviewer did not even turn on the camera.
The experience felt bad, but I did learn things about interviewing from it. Time to move on.
Discussion
Loading comments…