I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Cruise in Apr 2023
Interview
I did quite well during the phone screen and virtual onsite rounds yet ended up not getting an offer. The recruiter said there were many qualified candidates and my background wasn't a fit despite the fact that I did well and was told early on that my background was "impressive". Honestly, I couldn't have received a worse rejection email. He also did not bother to give any feedback. There are several major red flags with this company that you need to be aware of before deciding to interview with them. I discovered these as I researched them extensively: - Nepotism - Terrible WLB - Title inflation (staff engs with 2-3 years of experience) - No pay increase Despite all of these, I walked into the interviews because sometimes what you read on the Internet can be wrong. My gut feeling at the end of the interviews was not much had changed about Cruise. One interviewer mentioned that this is not the right company if you are looking to coast. Somehow, expecting a decent WLB (i.e. 40h a week) is equated with coasting. It seems the minimum expectation is work as much as you can to deliver projects with a tight deadline. For a lot of people, this maps to a minimum of 60 hours a week. Also, the behavioral round had some weird parts too like being asked to define "integrity" or explain "what diversity means to you?". These questions seemed to be time wasters especially for a software engineer who sits behind a computer all day looking at code. I could think of much better questions for that precious 1-hour meeting.
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Cruise (San Francisco, CA)
Interview
The interview process consisted of an initial recruiter screen followed by a technical phone interview focused on data structures and problem-solving in Python. The onsite loop included 4 rounds: one coding round (medium LeetCode-style problem), one system design round focused on building a scalable ML data processing pipeline, one backend/API design round, and one behavioral round. Interviewers emphasized real-world problem solving, tradeoffs, and communication. Overall, the process was structured and aligned with large-scale distributed systems and ML infrastructure.
Online submission. Then contacted by recruiter. The phone screening, and then onsite, which lasted an entire day in San Francisco office. Sat in a room while interviewers came and left.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
generic questions, nothing to really test what I knew. The interviewers seemed to not know how to interview a candidate and what to look for. I didn't want to work there after what i saw.
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Cruise in Nov 2024
Interview
The interview process consisted of a one-hour coding challenge followed by a one-hour deep dive with the hiring manager.
The coding challenge involved solving a LeetCode hard-level problem,
The discussion with the hiring manager focused on previous experience. Mismatch in chemistry. Rejected.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
coding round: lc high frequency hard
HM round: project deep dive