I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Cruise (San Francisco, CA) in Jan 2018
Interview
I was an overseas candidate. The Cruise recruiters and engineering team were very responsive and accomodating given the time difference and dates on which I could do an on-site. Each step was confirmed either the same day or the day after with a go/no-go.
- Initial phone screen with a recruiter to discuss background, what I knew about Cruise, and what I was interested in. Talked about which teams there are, and which I might be interested in.
- A coding task with an engineer using coderpad. I also had the chance to ask questions about the engineer's role, and the company as a whole. We then discussed more about my background and projects, as well as my overall skillset.
- On site. We got this scheduled right away to match with the dates I could visit. It was four hours of back-to-back interviews with the engineering team. Questions ranged from behavioral, to programming, to open-ended systems design questions, to the details of what I'd done in my projects to date. It was extremely tiring but everyone I spoke to was very enthusiastic, and the positive energy kept me going.
- Received an offer within the same week.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Leaving this unfilled as I'm under NDA regarding the interview specifics.
Pretty solid interview process. I felt the whole thing was very professional, despite a few small hiccups mostly around timing.
FIRST CONTACT: I applied through a referral in Nov 2017. A recruiter called me within a week, and we spoke on the phone about potential roles. Because of the holiday we had to set up the phone screen for mid-December.
PHONE SCREEN: There were two phone screens, one around machine learning and perception related domain knowledge and one focused more on coding. Both screens had some amount of coding, and I did both in C++. Coding questions were fairly standard ones, with a bit of a math bent to them.
ONSITE: I went onsite in Jan 2018. The visit was a half-day of interviews, starting at 1pm. I really appreciated that I didn't have to take a full day off work to attend this. Interviews were fairly split between domain expertise and coding. Reasonably challenging coding questions, I'd say around the same level of difficulty as a Google or Facebook coding interview. I got to check out the cars and got a hand written thank you card for coming in, which was nice and I really felt like the interview was a two-way process.
OFFER: I received an offer a week or so later. Comp was competitive with competing offers from Facebook and Google, although not before negotiation.
NEGATIVES: Not much. One interviewer forgot about me and came late, so we had to shorten that interview by 10ish minutes, so that wasn't great.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Some standard coding questions, with some bias towards graph and matrix problems (reasonable given the domain). Design problems around machine learning and optimization, all very open-ended with lots of room to discuss. Not a ton of math, although basics of optimization and stats/multivariate calculus assumed (especially around deep learning).
