I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Cruise
Interview
I have tried to apply online and as a result talked with two different recruiters. Both of them concluded that my experience was not a good fit for what they were looking for despite my experience with control engineering, sensor fusion, motion planning and prediction, embedded development and exposure to real-world electromechanical systems. Well, whatever :)
I have decided to try once more via referral and it was so much better this time. The whole interviewing felt a bit stochastic. I believe it is most likely due to the rapid company growth and HR department being a bit understaffed. I had two phone screenings, on-site and several calls with hiring managers. In the end they were ready to talk about the offer, but I had already accepted another one. Overall, I liked the company, but I also have a feeling that they struggle from the rapid growth and the career trajectory for new hires is not very clear.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
LRU Cache, word search in a grid, go over a high-level system diagram and talk about how to verify and test the system, design a queue etc.
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.
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
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.
