I've always dreamed of working at a self-driving company! These days, anyone who can still put their heart into working in autonomous driving really has passion for it. But unfortunately I didn't manage to make the most of my interview opportunity with XPeng :(
I don't think their recruiter was very professional. I emailed the recruiter to ask if there was an interview prep guide, and after the Python interview I sent over the answer I'd rethought through afterward, asking them to pass it along to the interviewer — the recruiter just never replied to me.
The interviewer didn't turn on his camera, but he asked me to keep mine on, which felt a little awkward.
The interviewer was very gentle and patient, and honestly his voice was really nice too, haha (let me have one minute of fangirling here).
We talked a lot about the internals of PySpark / Hive / Iceberg / MongoDB — things like row-wise vs. column-wise operations, when to choose MongoDB / NoSQL versus when to choose Iceberg, why you'd upgrade from Hive to Iceberg, what improvements Iceberg brings over Hive, and whether I was familiar with the Parquet file format.
I don't think I answered that part very well, but the interviewer was really patient and actually taught me a lot — this was probably the interview I took away the most from. He also shared a lot about the tech stack his own team uses.
For the Python question, it was LRU Cache. He mentioned I didn't have to use a linked list — an array list would work too. I have no idea why my brain froze, but I couldn't even write the array list version. A few minutes after the interview ended though, I had it figured out.
Wishing everyone lots of offers and good luck with your interviews!
Discussion
Loading comments…