I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Atomwise (San Francisco, CA) in Jun 2019
Interview
I interviewed on-site with them in San Francisco. They booked a flight and hotel to have me visit. Before coming on site, I had a standard phone screen.
The first session was a one-hour presentation that I had to deliver. The presentation could be about any data-specific project that I had worked on. I spent several days preparing the content for the presentation. It was attended by about a dozen people. Several questions were asked, mainly during the presentation itself, and not so many questions after it.
In addition to various interviewers, I was also scheduled to meet with a co-founder. Unfortunately, the co-founder didn't make time for it despite a calendar event for it; he was unavailable to meet with.
After the interview, I waited over two weeks but I didn't receive any concrete hiring decision whatsoever. That's one week more than what is courteous. Is this the kind of ghosting firm that you want to interview with? The impression I get is that they don't seriously need this role filled.
Interview questions [4]
Question 1
Given a dataset of a billion unique molecule IDs and their descriptions, and a million seemingly random IDs to extract from the dataset, how would you algorithmically architecture the solution in code that you write? You cannot use any databases or tools.
State and describe the different types of SQL joins. What is referential integrity? With regard to statistics and machine learning, state your knowledge of: p-value, hypothesis testing, overfitting, ensembling. With regard to working on the command-line, demonstrate your knowledge of these tools: awk, cat, cut, grep, sed.
