Astounding waste of one's time. Don't bother interviewing.

TL;DR: I interviewed, and at the last round, they told me about a fit mismatch despite not really screening for the fit (only DSA rounds), wasting my time.

I did not apply to this position but might have been in the pipeline because I had applied to other internships before. They got back to me to schedule interviews, but after providing my availability, they never got back to me. So I received an email to complete a Hackerrank test first.

In the Hackerrank test, I solved two LeetCode easy-medium questions.

Then they scheduled an interview with the hiring manager to discuss the role, my resume, experience, and interests. The hiring manager then moved me to the technical rounds, which were scheduled for two weeks later.

The recruiter I was paired with at C3 AI was so unresponsive that I had to email hr@c3.ai to get a response from her on what the technical rounds would be (DSA rounds, system design, or ML) because there was no information other than it being "technical rounds".

The technical rounds were three back-to-back elimination rounds but scheduled together. Each round was a mixture of some resume questions at the beginning, followed by one to two LeetCode easy-medium questions.

The interviewers in the first two rounds did tell me, upon seeing my resume, that there was no ML in this role but mostly abstractions on top of ML models (because I mostly have MLE experience, with only a short SDE stint). I told them that I was aware of this and was still interested, as my interview with the hiring manager had clarified everything for me, and he had also moved me to future rounds knowing my experience.

I spoke of some projects and solved the questions in both rounds. However, at the beginning of the third round—which was with a tech lead—he let me know that he had spoken with the other interviewers and that they would not be proceeding further. On asking for feedback, he said there was a mismatch of role and fit. It really pissed me off, as despite knowing my experience and wasting two hours of my time, and not really screening with any software rounds other than general DSA, they would come back to say my experience seemed to not match. They already had that information, and if they just wanted full-stack developers, they should have screened for it. Massive waste of time. Even if I had gotten through, I would be hard-pressed to accept the offer knowing such gross mismanagement and lack of respect for an interviewee's time.

HackerRank / LeetCode Easy-Medium Questions:

1. Go from a source to a target position on a board. Valid moves are (x, y) -> (x+y, y) or (x, y) -> (x, x+y).
2. Given a string and an integer k, remove all instances of k consecutive equal characters to compress the string to the smallest possible word.

With the hiring manager and at the beginning of technical rounds, questions were asked about:

• Resume
• Experience
• Tech stack
• Challenges faced in work/projects

Technical Round Coding Questions:

1st Round: Given a binary tree, find a path between any two nodes.

2nd Round: LeetCode Two Sum: Given an array and a target sum, find the indices of the elements that add up to the target. Then, optimize the solution to O(1) space.