Peltarion interview questions

I applied online. The process consists of a quick quiz then two interviews followed by a task. The process also includes extra four steps that I didn't go through. It took a month and a half from the first reply till the last -- the first four stages of recruitment. Although the interviews were friendly and nice, I have found the feedback from the task lacks analysis and judgment of a good data scientist. The data science team appears to have limited idea of how to construct an understanding of the candidate through a task. It would be better for them in the future to look at the details of the provided task and consider adding an expected time limit to the task. Recruitment tasks should consume 1-5 hours that should be utilized to show various aspects of the candidate. If they expect a week project from a 3-hours task, perhaps they should reconsider their ability to recruit efficiently, as well as their data science and analytical skills. They also seem not to know what they want or how to assess it and just hope to be impressed in general (which is quite a disappointing way of thinking for a professional data scientist.) That being said, the HR department is more than professional and the best in terms of giving a good image of the company and supporting the candidate.

In summary, I have just under 10 years of experience and I’ve worked for some internationally recognised tech companies in MLE/DS roles, so as a candidate, I felt that Peltarion’s interview process is sloppy and they are still figuring out how to assess people properly. After applying I received a timed multi-choice questionnaire to complete. It was an ML trivia with only about 10 questions but they attempted to cover a broad range of topics from probability to NLP, computer vision and more. Overall, I thought that the questionnaire was a poor assessment of one’s skills because some questions focused on tiny details of ML subtopics (so if you get it wrong they probably assume that you know nothing at all about this area of ML) and others were outright ambiguous (e.g. what role does the test set play and what role does the validation set play — that’s a single multi-choice question). They did not think I did particularly well in the test, so they asked me a few follow-up questions in an email — kudos to Peltarion for keeping an open mind here. They seemed to be satisfied with my responses and decided to proceed to the next round where I was interviewed by 4 people of which 2 were from the management and 2 were MLEs. I was given a detailed presentation about Peltarion and I was asked to talk about my own experiences. I was also explained what the rest of the process would look like: if I proceed to the next stage, then I’d be asked to do a home assignment which I would get to present at the next interview; beyond that, I’d get to meet the team and then the founders before being presented with an offer. However, a few days after the first interview I received an email saying that they will not be proceeding with my application because (1) they want someone with a deeper knowledge of neural nets and (2) they want someone who has demonstrated more leadership in their past roles. I completely respect their decision, however, I feel that I was not given the opportunity to demonstrate just how well I do (or don’t) know NNs nor was I ever questioned on my past leadership experience.