In summary, I have just under 10 years of experience and I’ve worked for some internationally recognised tech companies in MLE/DS roles, so as a candidate, I felt that Peltarion’s interview process is sloppy and they are still figuring out how to assess people properly. After applying I received a timed multi-choice questionnaire to complete. It was an ML trivia with only about 10 questions but they attempted to cover a broad range of topics from probability to NLP, computer vision and more. Overall, I thought that the questionnaire was a poor assessment of one’s skills because some questions focused on tiny details of ML subtopics (so if you get it wrong they probably assume that you know nothing at all about this area of ML) and others were outright ambiguous (e.g. what role does the test set play and what role does the validation set play — that’s a single multi-choice question). They did not think I did particularly well in the test, so they asked me a few follow-up questions in an email — kudos to Peltarion for keeping an open mind here. They seemed to be satisfied with my responses and decided to proceed to the next round where I was interviewed by 4 people of which 2 were from the management and 2 were MLEs. I was given a detailed presentation about Peltarion and I was asked to talk about my own experiences. I was also explained what the rest of the process would look like: if I proceed to the next stage, then I’d be asked to do a home assignment which I would get to present at the next interview; beyond that, I’d get to meet the team and then the founders before being presented with an offer. However, a few days after the first interview I received an email saying that they will not be proceeding with my application because (1) they want someone with a deeper knowledge of neural nets and (2) they want someone who has demonstrated more leadership in their past roles. I completely respect their decision, however, I feel that I was not given the opportunity to demonstrate just how well I do (or don’t) know NNs nor was I ever questioned on my past leadership experience.