Research Engineer Interview Experience

I got in through a referral, then did a recruiter screen, two 60 min technical screens, and three more technical interviews after that. I got rejected after those technical rounds, so I never made it to the hiring manager chat and maybe a team presentation, which sounded like the next steps. The whole process felt a lot less gameable than a normal big-tech loop. The first screen was more of a real algorithm problem, the second was about writing correct code fast, and the later rounds were practical ML/debugging plus one really hard stats-heavy round. The ML stats round was the one that hit hardest because it felt like graduate-level information theory, and across the process I got fewer hints than I'm used to.

I got in through a referral, then did a recruiter screen, two 60 min technical screens, and three more technical interviews after that. I got rejected after those technical rounds, so I never made it to the hiring manager chat and maybe a team presentation, which sounded like the next steps. The whole process felt a lot less gameable than a normal big-tech loop. The first screen was more of a real algorithm problem, the second was about writing correct code fast, and the later rounds were practical ML/debugging plus one really hard stats-heavy round. The ML stats round was the one that hit hardest because it felt like graduate-level information theory, and across the process I got fewer hints than I'm used to.