Applied for the position of AI Software Engineer.
First got a phone interview, chatted with the recruiter and asked about my experience, skills, etc. Then got an invitation to an onsite interview. Up to this point, my impression of the team has been positive, but things turned south since the onsite interview.
The onsite had two interviewers including the recruiter I talked to earlier. The other one is an AI engineer who works on the team. I mostly talked to the engineer and he asked me mostly about my past projects and some conceptual technical questions. I believe I gave very prepared answers to all the questions and really showed them my strong background in the field. One of the questions was a system design question and I proposed a solution using the K-means algorithm; however, the engineer guy said he was expecting me to tell him the problem is unsolvable since ”too many factors were involved in the problem”. I would consider this is one of those “dick moves” an interviewer can pull out to a candidate, if you know the question is unsolvable why do you ask?
Anyway, after the onsite, I was given a coding assessment (two LC easy). I solved all the questions and passed all the tests. In the end, I received an email from the recruiter telling me that the team changed the hiring direction and would not consider me anymore.
In summary, I did everything I could and performed well in the hiring process but got turned down because the team doesn’t know what they really want for a candidate. I wasted two weeks of time for nothing. Here is my observation of the AI & Data Science team at Munich Re (Toronto office): the people who are in charge of the technical aspect don’t have a strong technical background and have never built anything of production-grade; this is observed from my interaction with the engineer interviewer. I would advise anyone who seeks a long-term career in applied machine learning or data science to avoid this company.