After an initial phone screen with the recruiter, I was interviewed for an Engineering Manager position in the Data Products department. The main position requirement was to build a system from scratch that would allow data scientists to deploy their machine learning models directly to production. The director of Data Products asked a series of architectural questions related to the position.

We had some technical conversation where the director tried to understand my approach with some general questions, like how to handle a huge number of users and how to build a system that would efficiently allow them to deploy their models directly to production. It was a little hard to answer these questions without more detailed information on requirements, without the underlying architecture, and without getting more information on the format in which data scientists produce these models. No other details were given about the questions themselves.

After the technical conversation, we talked about my past experience as a team leader and the current process we use. There were no questions that required extensive project management knowledge.

As a result, I didn't get the offer, but I am pleased with the interview process. HR was very responsive, and the director was a very kind person. They contacted me two times after this process later on for similar positions. So, maybe they give a score and keep previous candidates in their database for better-fit positions in the future.

• How to handle a huge number of users concurrently?
• How to build a system that will efficiently allow us to deploy our models directly to production?