Absolutely terrible interview process. Do NOT waste your time with this company. Was given the audio pipeline classification take home assignment (which has already been thoroughly analyzed by a GitHub repo online). The “grader” who looked at my submission was clearly incompetent on basic ML concepts (ex. what is overfit) and blissfully unaware that their take home challenge has already been publicly solved, expecting candidates to replicate the same solution? Also they apparently can’t read Python files unless they are notebooks…
I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at SFL Scientific
Interview
I’m relieved to see I wasn’t the only one who encountered a very strange interview process with SFL. After a two-part take-home data exercise that demanded ~20 hours of work, plus three rounds of behavioral and technical phone interviews, I was ultimately made an offer ~2 months after applying. That offer was then rescinded two weeks later when the firm opted not to pursue the contract for which they were most immediately hiring, allegedly because they didn’t feel it aligned with the firm’s mission. Why this decision was made only after all the labor of interviewing me is unclear. Moreover, they have continued posting the same position ever since, suggesting they were maybe planning to hire me for just that single contract, contrary to what I was explicitly told in the interview process. Quite a strange experience, all around!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Various, including: What was the last academic paper you read? What is the architectural foundation of recent LLMs? One of the take-home exercises required developing a basic ML classification pipeline for audio data (an interesting problem, at least!)
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at SFL Scientific (Boston, MA) in Oct 2021
Interview
Initial screening call. The SFL interviewer, Camille, was engaging and professional. She made me feel at ease during the process. She discussed the SFL open position, and spoke about their focus on projects, rapid growth, and leadership.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Asked about my current employment, skills, AI knowledge, and what I was looking for in my career.