Updated by xAI candidates
Software Engineer Interview Experience
In the second coding round, he shared a bunch of code for some LLM thing and kept saying, "go through the code, go through the code" whenever I asked for inputs or outputs. I didn’t write a single line, and honestly I was glad when the next round got canceled.
Interview process
I applied online and the process started with a 30-minute engineer screen instead of a recruiter screen. After that, they scheduled what I was told were the final rounds: two coding interviews on one day and a design round the next day. The first coding round was a standard LRU cache interview and felt fair, but the second one was rough because the interviewer gave me a big LLM-related codebase, refused to clarify inputs or outputs, and just kept telling me to read the code. That same evening, they canceled my last design round and then ghosted me when I asked for an explanation. Overall it felt very inconsistent: one interviewer was reasonable, the next was not, and the process ended without any real closure.
- Phone interview
- Technical interview
- Final round
Interview tips
I would prep the normal data structures stuff because at least one round was completely standard. But I would also spend some time getting comfortable reading messy, larger codebases and brushing up on basic LLM or agent concepts, even if the job description looks like plain software engineering. Also be ready for very little guidance in the interview, because in my case one interviewer would not even give a simple input-output example. I would not expect much prep help from the company side.
Company culture
What I saw was a pretty engineer-driven process. I did not have a recruiter screen at all, and from what I had read and from how this played out, it felt like engineers were heavily involved even in screening. The interviews also did not feel standardized. One round was a normal coding interview, and another felt like the interviewer could do whatever he wanted, which made the experience pretty uneven. I also got the sense that they may expect AI or LLM familiarity even when the role is described more broadly as software engineering. On top of that, the communication was weak: no prep call, no useful clarification in the hardest round, and then silence after they canceled the last interview.
Questions asked
Overview
I was told there was one more design round after those two interviews, and that was supposed to be the last stage. After my second coding round, I got a cancellation email for the design interview. I emailed the recruiter asking why and also mentioned that the second coding round was not what I had expected, but I never got a response. I am not even sure whether that last round would have been system design or more object-oriented design because the recruiter only called it a design round.
Question types asked
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