TLDR: Easy technical interviews, very tedious and duplicated behavioural interviews, interrogation style final “culture fit” interview.
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Phone Screens:
Stage 1: Recruiter screen, talked about the role, interview process, motivation. Ask about my current salary, but I didn’t feel comfortable to share.
Stage 2: Interview with a tech lead and a project manager, talked about past experience,
the role, and some behavioural questions from the project manager.
Stage 3: Interview with the department director, talked about past experience, career progression in the department, weakness, etc. Dived deeper into the role, and allowed me to ask loads of questions. Half background, half behavioural.
Virtual On-site:
Stage 4: 90 minutes C++ quiz, required me to have a local or remote IDE to run the code. Basically asked me to design a data structure to solve a problem they might have came across in a project. I would say it’s a LC medium problem. The follow-up was LC difficult problem, basically they want you to extend the functionalities. I got quite good feedback on this round.
Stage 5: Behavioural interview with a team member. Talked about the negative experiences in my current company. Strange enough, they really want to dig into your negative past experiences, rather than what you are proud of. The feedback was pass.
Stage 6: System presentation interview with the department director (same person in Stage 3). I talked about a technique approach that I applied to one of my projects, game related. They expect you to finish within 10 minutes, and the remaining 50 minutes were Q&A. I got good feedback from this round too.
A few days later:
Stage 7: Recruiter call, went through my previous on-site interview feedback. Prepare me for the next stage. Also asked me about the salary expectation, and I gave him a rough number. He said he’ll be working on the offer, which made me think that I was very close to getting it. He also mentioned they were aware that I worked in a small team, but that wasn’t a problem. They were confident that I could become a senior level programmer in 18 months.
Then the weirdest thing happens:
Stage 8: Final culture fit interview. I wasn’t lucky enough to speak to the CEO as some of the other posts here. I was scheduled to interview with 2 VPs. However, the actual interview was with 2 principle engineers from different teams, and I wasn’t even notified in advance, which I reckon is very unprofessional. My pre-prepared tailored questions were useless. And one of the interviewers seemed like I was wasting his time. The interview was held in an interrogation style, they assumed that I was not interested in the company nor the role, but I was still interviewing the company. They also assume that I was not able to work in a larger company. Duplicated behavioural questions on negative experiences.
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A week later I got a typical "thank you, but unfortunately..." email from the recruiter, saying that I wasn’t a good fit due to my past experience.
Overall, I think the recruiter was professional, all the team members I met were nice, but the final interview, that principle engineer, was very rude and arrogant. Hey, where is your "Relentless humility" culture.
I've seen a few posts here as well, talking about the weird culture fit interview and the negative interview experience. I think Improbable are growing fast, but meanwhile, some senior members got arrogant. They do have issues hiring more technical oriented candidates.
My advice to the hiring process: More technical tests, and limit the behavioural interview to one round only. You are hiring a software engineer, not an HR person.
