Designing a great interview process for engineers is tricky. How do we offer an accurate and comprehensive view of the role while respecting your time? How do we give you the opportunity to showcase your skills without resorting to contrived tests or introducing bias?
Collectively, the team at Imbue has observed the hiring process at dozens of software companies. We have built a technical interview process from first principles with the goal of creating a rich bidirectional flow of information between you as a candidate and our team. If you're interviewing for a technical position on our Research/Engineering team, here's what you can expect.
After you submit your contact information, resume, and optional cover letter on our careers page, we will review your resume and email you whether or not we’d like to move forward. We strive to get back to you within ~1 week, but there may be a delay in times of higher volume.
Some important notes about our review process:
If we do not move forward, we encourage you to apply again in the future! That being said, we ask that you wait until you’ve had a significant change in your experience, which is hard to do in less than 12 months or so.
This call is 30 min over Zoom with one of our recruiters. This is an informal time to get to know each other and make sure we’re aligned on expectations, both in terms of the work you want to do and the environment you want to be in. We’ll look for opportunities to offer up relevant information as we chat, and we’ll leave dedicated time for questions towards the end. Feel free to ask questions about our technical work and roadmap. If there’s anything we can’t answer during the call, we will make sure to get you those answers afterwards.
This call is between 45 and 60 min over Zoom (depending on how long it takes to work through the problem). In order to give every candidate a fair, equitable, and consistent experience, we have dedicated Technical Interviewers on our team whose sole responsibility is to conduct these coding interviews. Because they are not members of our technical staff, they will not be able to answer questions about our work. However, we encourage you to take advantage of our website, and to direct any questions related to our company or work to your recruiter!
Some additional notes about this interview:
Note: For those who feel that they consistently underperform in live interview settings, we do offer an alternative take-home coding exercise. Please ask about this if it is something you’re interested in!
This call is between 60 to 90 min over Zoom. During this time, you will pair with a senior member of our technical staff and work on a problem that neither of you have seen before. In fact, you’ll pick the problem together at the start of the interview, and the goal is to figure out the solution together.
The problems are similar to the previous coding interview in nature (e.g. no ML knowledge required) but are much, much harder. (As a reference, the difficulty level is similar to Div 1 Level 3 on Topcoder.) The focus is on problem-solving and collaboration, and it is okay if you don’t have time to actually produce much code!
We like this interview because it’s more reflective of our actual working style (we spend a lot of time solving novel problems together), and we find that most candidates enjoy it as well for this very reason.
The final round of interviews is a 2-day trial project during which you will work on a “live” project, i.e. one that is real, relevant, and valuable to our work. Because this is a serious time commitment and produces useful output for our team, we pay you for your work. The experience is meant to emulate what it is actually like to work with us, so that there are no surprises if you do end up joining the team.
Some additional details about the trial project:
After the trial project concludes, we debrief internally and strive to get back to you by the end of the week. If we decide to move forward, the last step in the process is references. We use the information gathered during the interview process to request specific references. We prioritize talking to your references as soon as they are available; this step usually takes 3–5 days.
It’s important to note that we take references more seriously than your typical startup and have had to refrain from giving an offer at this stage.
Should everything go well with the reference checks, we will deliver a verbal offer followed by a call to discuss the offer details. Once we reach an offer that we are both happy with, we will send you your written offer letter. We can also set up supplemental conversations at this point so you can fully evaluate the opportunity before making a decision.
You will also be assigned a Talent Coordinator who will help with the logistics. If you have any questions throughout the interview process, don’t be shy about reaching out to them. We look forward to meeting and getting to know you better!
If you’re interested in what we’re doing, we’d love to hear from you. To apply, see our open roles.