I applied online. I interviewed at Personalis in Jun 2025
No offer
Neutral experience
Average interview
Application
I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Personalis (Fremont, CA)
Interview
The interview process began with the interviewer providing a detailed overview of the role, offering insight into the position’s responsibilities and expectations. Following this introduction, the conversation shifted to a series of behavioral questions focused on past experiences with data manipulation and inquiries into my career aspirations. The interview concluded with technical questions designed to assess my knowledge of cell biology and my proficiency in coding. Many of these question seemed to be geared more towards the memorization of syntax and facts rather than application.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How do you obtain the 8th line and 5th column from a dataset using the terminal command-line? What is the difference between a tuple and a list? Difference between a somatic and germline variant?
Applied and had an email 8 days later to schedule a phone screening. Zoom interview with the hiring manager the following week. Questions were mostly technical, about Bash, Python, and genetics. I could either type out my answer in the zoom chat or just say the answer out loud. Interview lasted an hour. Never heard from them again afterwards.
I applied in-person. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Personalis (Menlo Park, CA) in Nov 2014
Interview
The whole process took 4+ weeks. I was given an online programming language from a third party website. I chose C language, the questions were based on your performance on previous questions. If you did well then the website will give you more difficult questions. I did surpass 89% of those who took the same test. One needs to be able to handle complex data structures and function pointers to achieve this percentile. Then I got an online algorithm test from an interviewer. I had to type the pseudo-code on Google Doc and talk to the interviewer on the phone. For the onsite interview, I presented my work during my PhD study. Then I was asked some questions about NGS.
