I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at 12traits (Berlin) in Jul 2021
Interview
The interview process with 12traits was as great of experience as job interview can be.
Starting from HR stage and later into the interviews with potential lead and (if you do well) with founders of the company the communication is very prompt, direct and respectful.
From the interviews I got a clear idea of what business does and if I want to work for this company. Don't hesitate to ask questions, they are welcome. I really liked how interviewers handled my questions about the company.
The interviews for my position was very challenging and made me think really hard on a specific problem of unsupervised learning. So after interviewing I had a good perspective on what my day-to-day work in the company could be like. It's not like the experience from my friends in FAAMG (is it MAAMG now haha) companies, where they were asked advanced questions about algorithms in the interview and then many of them ended up working on mundane problems day-to-day and did not reach the level of complexity they had on interview.
You will be challenged for a reason in the interviews. And you will have a chance to make mistakes. I did some. But you will be treated friendly and respectfully at every stage. I guess, unlike in big companies where you are interviewed by people who won't work with you and they basically put you on a scoreboard here people want to understand if they are able to work with you day-to-day.
If you have an interview with founders of the company, you will clearly understand the mission of the company and if you're like me you will get extremely inspired after this interview.
To sum up, the interview process was a really great experience for me partly because it was very challenging intellectually. The interviews --- especially with founders of the company --- gave me good understanding of the company's mission and plans and I could make an informed decision if I want to work there.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Where do you want to be in 5 years from now?
What would you change in your next job relative to your last/current one?
Why do you want to work for 12traits?
You have to train an unsupervised model (e.g. clustering). How do you assess if you assigned the most correct labels to observations without pre-labeled data at hand?