I applied online, and the process took four weeks.

The phone screen will start with some questions about your CV, and then they will move onto behavioral questions and why the firm. They will also ask what you know about functional programming to gauge your understanding. If they are satisfied, then they will give you an outline of the next stage.

The second stage is the most challenging part of the process, where you will be given a coding assignment involving Spark and Scala. There will be a small number of tasks in the assignment which have different levels of difficulty. There is also a bonus optional question, which was rather hard to solve and was based on a previous solution. The timeframe for the second stage is a week, though they are willing to extend it a bit depending on circumstances such as exams. I highly recommend reading the instructions carefully on setting up the JDK and the IDE, as getting the wrong JDK version which is not compatible with the latest Spark versions can cause issues. If the assessors like your submission and it checks the boxes, then you will get a feedback call within a few days. For the feedback call, they will go through your code and tell you which one is correct, and which one is wrong and why it is wrong. Here, taking the feedback and improving your code for the final round will be crucial for the code review. You will get to ask questions about the final stage of the process.

For the final interview, you will be given slides to fill out for the presentation prior to the meeting. Two Quantexans will be your interviewers, and the two-hour session will start off with you giving a quick rundown through your CV. Then they will ask a few questions about your experience and responsibilities. The second portion is a presentation on a technical project which you have done, for which I've used my dissertation project. Here, you need to keep an eye on the time limit and expect some follow-up questions on the presentation. The third portion would be the code review. You will need to explain how you got to your current solution and whether you can scale this process effectively if the dataset was a magnitude of n times larger. Any changes you have done from the feedback call must be shown to the interviewers during the code review, and you will be expected to explain the process and reason for your changes. If you do get stuck, then the interviewers happily will point you in the right direction, though they can ask on-the-spot questions to see how you think. For the final part, you will do the business case study, which gives you an insight into what a Big Data Graduate would expect to work on during their time at Quantexa. If you have done some reading beforehand, then you would be ready to tackle some of the on-the-spot questions which may pop up in the business case study. Once the interview is done, they'll begin the Q&A session, where you can ask questions about Quantexa and life in the firm. They would then give you an update a few days later, which involves a feedback call. If you are successful, then they will make you an offer at the end of the call.

I can say Quantexa is very fast with the application process, with roughly around a week or less in between different stages. The amazing support from the talent team sets them apart from many of the graduate recruiters.

What do you know about functional programming? Can you tell me about a time when you have worked in a team? Do you know why we prefer immutability?