After I mass-applied, HR got back to me very quickly. It was a traditional product role. The HR was pretty professional and knew the team's situation well, which deserves a thumbs up. The next step was a chat with the team's TL.
The chat with the TL also went well, so I skipped the phone screen and went straight to the onsite.
The onsite was in person at the office, three rounds in total:
- Project presentation. I had to prepare slides in advance, which it seems a lot of companies require now, but their requirements were more numerous and more detailed. The audience had both engineers and PMs, who asked questions from time to time.
- Coding. The interviewer opened by saying we would not write code, and I was like, what? The problem is hard to describe, but it was not difficult. It involved state transitions and designing data structures, and I wrote pseudocode.
- System design: design the delayed tweet feature for Twitter. I had prepared a set of interview write-ups, and not a single one of those questions came up. I answered it more or less, but when I got back and asked an AI, its answer and mine did not fully match. Maybe that was where I failed?
Before sending me off, HR asked me for feedback on the interview, and I ended up saying a whole lot. A few days later I got a rejection email. I asked whether there was any feedback, and they never replied.
While chatting with the coding interviewer, he said xAI is more startup than a startup, and everyone is busy as hell. A new feature was shipping in a few days, and it would go straight to 100% with no dial up. I asked what happens if something goes wrong, and he said there is no "what if".
The onsite does not provide lunch because there is no cafeteria, so there are lots of takeout options at the entrance around noon.
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