This is a niche quant firm. I interviewed for the software engineer role, which required strong C++ — after this point, all the coding rounds were C++ only.
Recruiter chat: besides the usual questions, they threw in some C++ trivia on the spot, things like what default constructors a class can have.
PM chat: I talked with their Lead PM, a very sharp guy. He mostly asked about my resume, and a lot of the time I ended up explaining technical things to him — felt like they were mainly evaluating communication. It went well, and later during the onsite he came back to talk with me again for an hour, and we even got into what projects I'd work on after joining...
Onsite: three rounds at their office.
HM: first talked about projects for a while, then had me do a Trie problem on the computer — searching text, including wildcard matching.
Coding round with two of their engineers: also started with a brief chat about projects, then LeetCode 295.
Then another engineer came in with a problem — one they made up themselves, not too hard.
Then the annoying part happened. After the onsite, everyone seemed to think it went well, so they wanted one last chat with the CEO — early the next morning at 8am. At that point I still felt good about the whole culture, plus the office is close to home, so I figured, fine, I'll get up early. I assumed it would just be a culture-fit chat with the CEO. Turns out — I don't know if he was having a bad morning or what — the connection was bad at first, he said he couldn't hear well, got impatient, we reconnected a few times, and then with a cold expression he just said "talk about a project." So I started talking. About halfway through he cut in with "what's hard about this, isn't it just XXX" — basically the equivalent of me saying I built Amazon and him going "so what, it's just a website where you buy stuff." I was so annoyed I almost laughed. I'm a veteran of a big tech company myself, and the scope of the project I described and my communication were definitely fine — I'd already gotten good feedback across various tech mid-size company interviews. I get that people from other industries won't always follow the details, but there's no need to gaslight me about it... Anyway, he then had me share my screen and do a coding problem, and with 20 minutes left he didn't even let me ask questions before ending the call.
Overall, the team was pretty good — everyone was very collaborative, none of that aggressive attitude some quant firms have. And apparently the job is fairly relaxed — they take a full month off every July, and there's no super formal performance review process or anything. It's just the CEO that was really something else...
One more thing — I do feel like there's a disconnect when people coming from big tech talk about their projects, and not just at this company. Engineers at other finance companies often don't have the basic context and don't get why something is hard, even when you explain a lot. But when I talk to hiring managers from other tech companies, there's zero gap like that. Anyway, I ended up getting other offers, so I stopped caring about this one.
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