Initial call with recruiter: A standard call.

Technical phone screen with the hiring manager, developing a model. This was a bit of a weird one. No environment was provided; I was asked to share my screen and code on my personal computer. Instead of communicating and walking through the development process, highlighting knowledge, trade-offs, etc., about halfway through the interview, I was told to "treat it as a Kaggle competition." So, it was less speaking and more coding. Okay.

Virtual onsite was 6 hours. Breaks were factored in, but many of the interviews ran over. The rounds included: DS, ML system design (though it wasn't), behavioral/cross-functional, hiring manager, and recruiter rounds.

Overall, the preparation call was terrible. "Prepare for everything" and "looking for depth and breadth" offered zero help, and I walked away more confused. The DS interview was pretty standard, an enjoyable conversation.

The ML system design was NOT the industry standard that most companies are converging to. This was hugely misleading (the recruiter did not clarify this even when I explicitly asked) and was the section of the interview that let me down. Preparing for a system design interview is very different from preparing for an ML system design interview. However, I was able to discuss and provide solutions. Also, the tool used in this section (think cloud-based presentation software) was terrible for fast architectural design diagrams with iterations as you're building out the solution.

In the coding round, my interviewer was somewhat unfamiliar with a trie, which is fine but made it a little different/confusing compared to standard coding rounds where only optimal solutions are accepted. Overall, though, the coding round was pretty refreshing compared to FAANG.

Overall, I feel the process wasn't great. Two sections were good, the others weren't, and it just overall could definitely be better. I feel like there's perhaps a lack of transparency in the process as well. The feedback I received was not relevant to any questions I was asked, and if given the opportunity, I could directly address it. But oh well, better opportunities are out there.

The NDA was signed, so I can't say.