This team is looking for an AI-native engineer whose main responsibility is making various internal processes and tools AI-driven.
They started interviewing with AI coding last quarter. You need to set up your own AI environment and share your screen. The AI coding interview mainly evaluates how you use AI, so the problem itself is usually not very hard. This one was considered one of the more complicated problems.
The company provides money-transfer services, and the fee for sending money from region A to region B differs by route. Imagine the interviewer is an engineering manager with a requirement: build a program that returns a list of the transfer fees charged by every provider on the market between any pair of regions, so the manager can see where the company's service stands and whether it is competitive.
The interviewer said that the higher the level, the fewer details they provide, so you need to discover the requirements yourself.
The initial requirement was simply that the engineering manager wanted price-comparison software. I had to ask questions step by step to find out what it should actually do.
I learned that people currently visit each website manually to find and compare the information, so automating that process would be ideal.
One thing somebody unfamiliar with the domain might miss is that the fee for the same A-to-B transfer changes with the transfer amount. To simplify the comparison, the tool therefore needs an amount as input.
I also had to decide what scope of working prototype I could complete during the interview.
Another difficult part was that I had to find the competitors' price information myself. There was no other input. This was a trap and could consume a lot of time, so I suggest getting one provider working first. I initially asked whether I could use someone else's API. The interviewer said I had to figure it out myself. I said that if an API was unavailable, I could scrape the website, and the interviewer said that was fine. After I finished scraping, the interviewer asked whether there was another way to get the information. I said that without an API, I could only scrape a third-party website, and the data might not be current. Then the conversation circled back to saying I could use an API. Excuse me? :)
After I had a working prototype, the interviewer asked many questions about what else I would do before presenting it to the engineering manager. I mentioned verifying the generated result and checking it manually. If the manager were not technical, I could add a simple UI. I also mentioned tests, CI/CD, monitoring, and more. The interviewer said all of that was good but that something might still be missing. I was never told what that missing thing was.
As an aside, the interviewer arrived with a dead laptop and spent five minutes finding a power supply and plugging it in. The rest of the interaction was okay. The interviewer said they had conducted at least 30 AI coding interviews. I am not sure what they wanted to see. I completed basically the entire process and even verified the generated code and tests, although the interviewer did not seem to care much about those things.
A few hours later, HR told me I would not move on. There was no feedback.
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