Scale AI Software Engineer Interview Experience — Question-Bank Loop, Rude Hiring Manager

Phone screen: the classic question from the interview reports, Task Processor: Dependencies and Deadlines.

VO:

Project deep dive: normal. The interviewer only asked some follow-ups on project details and didn't ask many BQ questions.

SD: the classic embedding + classification API question from the interview reports.

Practical Coding: the CSV-to-JSON question that's in the interview reports.

Credo (BQ): note that this round is with an interviewer who doesn't understand tech at all, so focus on behavior and don't go into much technical detail, they won't understand it anyway. The interviewer also has to get through 4 sections of questions and their follow-up question list for each section, so keep your answers short and don't spend so long on details that they can't finish their questions. The one I remember best was strengths & weaknesses.

HM: we introduced ourselves to each other, the HM introduced the team, and asked me a few BQ questions.

Summary: apart from the non-tech interviewer in the Credo round, everyone I met at Scale AI in every other round looked tired and very serious. I got the feeling the atmosphere at this company isn't great.

The recruiter was also weird. Before the onsite, they insisted on getting my expected TC. I said let's wait until I pass the onsite and we get to the offer stage, but the recruiter really wouldn't let it go. They even asked whether I'd accept it if their TC was a hundred-something thousand lower than other companies'. They also kept hyping that they're the only company in the market doing data annotation and are about to IPO and everyone will get rich and so on... I was speechless. Seriously?

The HM round was the worst experience. The HM came over from Meta and had a terrible attitude. Whatever I asked, they answered with an extremely impatient look. When they asked me a question and I started answering, this HM looked down and started playing on their phone. Even with an AI notetaker you shouldn't do that, right? This is absolutely the most disrespectful HM toward a candidate that I've ever seen. After I barely made it through that round I no longer wanted to join at all.

Overall: basically all of this company's questions come from a question bank, so if you prepare well, passing shouldn't be hard. But I have reservations about what it would be like to work there.