An employee reached out to me after seeing some of my projects. The role was initially for a senior position, but after reviewing my CV, they said they were more than willing to consider me for a junior role. After a call with the CTO, I was given a take-home assessment: to use an LLM to extract keywords from 160 abstracts (provided as a file). The task description emphasized that it was expected to be a 2-hour task. I adhered to that timeframe and produced a working solution, though it could have been improved with more time. However, a few days later, I received an email from HR stating, "The team has decided to pass on your candidacy after reviewing your submittal." Ouch. They offered feedback, so I asked for it—but I never received anything. No notes, no details, nothing. I have no idea whether it was due to the vague "report" section, the code, or the approach. I'll never know! A few other red flags: they’re looking for "end-to-end" AI engineers. If you’re at this stage of developing AI products, you should have more distinct roles to handle that workflow effectively.