Unfortunately, I must express my disappointment with the organization of the interview rounds from the start. The initial interview with the recruiter was unexpectedly canceled without explanation. After rescheduling and completing this interview, the second interview was also canceled just a few hours before it was supposed to take place. Upon rescheduling, I joined the session where the Senior Applied Scientist conducted the interview in a polite and professional manner. However, I believe he lacked a proper understanding of how to conduct a technical interview. He did not provide any details about the technical aspects of the role or the company's objectives. As a result, I had no clear understanding of the real challenges the company faces or the approaches they are interested in pursuing. Instead, he had a long list of technical questions aimed at testing my familiarity with specific terms, which I believe is an unprofessional approach to interviewing.
I managed to answer all but two of the questions, yet I was judged as lacking deep knowledge of LLMs, NLP, and Transformers. Interestingly, not a single question was specifically about NLP. All the questions focused on certain functionalities of neural networks and one on statistical analysis. Although I was initially hesitant to participate in the interview due to the apparent disorganization within the company, I chose to attend out of respect for the invitation. Unfortunately, it wasn't until the last question of the interview, which was about fine-tuning LLMs, that I noticed the interviewer's limited understanding in this area. It became clear to me that he is not the appropriate person for this role, which explains many of the issues I encountered during the interview process. I hope Fresco, as a new and small venture, improves its environment and management to achieve greater success.