I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Citrine Informatics in Nov 2019
Interview
Started with a call with the recruiter followed by a panel video conference within a week. There was a glitch with the video but nothing out of the ordinary.
Questions were standard. Nothing out of the ordinary, unusual, or unfair.
Folks were professional and courteous.
I thought I did really well but got a rejection in a few days (which I appreciate it more than the common ghosting).
Wish them all the best.
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Citrine Informatics (Redwood City, CA) in Mar 2019
Interview
Initial phone call with the hiring manager. Followed by an assignment with three parts. Followed by full day of onsite (4-5 rounds) + lunch + dinner.
Everyone in the team was friendly. They conduct two structured interviews, which gets monotonous after a few questions. Essentially, they're trying to follow Amazon style behavioral interviews. However, having gone through Amazon interview process. They generally ask you two at max three behavioral question whereas each of their structured interviews had about five or six! Not necessary imo. Though I must say they did a good job in setting the expectation and I was anticipating that.
Overall, it was a decent experience. I had other parallel interviews with other firms and I was upfront about that.
I thought I did fairly well in the interviews, but got a rejection after few days. When I asked for feedback, guess what? No reply! (Guess what? Can’t rate a positive experience!)
Two words of caution:
1. There payscale is not upto the Bay Area benchmark (Half the team is offsite for that reason). Conversation with hiring manager was like “we don’t pay to the level of Google/Facebook, but it’s livable”. Classic sign of looking for cheap labor with high potential. That said, no harm in that most early stage companies go with that stage, but make sure to set the expectation right, so none of us waste time.
2. Bay Area is a small community, few lines of feedback to candidates who invested time in assignments and flew in for whole day of interview will a long way!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Assignment was:
1. Amazon style press release for a product.
2. KPIs to measure?
3. How would you work with engineers?
Thank you so much for your feedback, we whole heartedly apologize for not providing additional feedback to you after your on site. We appreciate and recognize the time it takes to come on site for a final interview. Since reading your feedback we have implemented a policy where a member of the Talent team will call a candidate after an on site to decline them and provide feedback if requested. We also subscribe to a Structured Interview methodology (similar to Amazon as mentioned above) to ensure a fair process for all candidates. We have written our questions so there is a direction 1:1 ratio to interview question per company value, which is why we ask more than other companies who use the same structure. This helps us ensure that all employees who join the team embody our values to a certain degree. Apologies again if either of these resulted in a negative experience, but thank you for your note and for helping us improve!
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Citrine Informatics (Redwood City, CA) in Jan 2019
Interview
Extremely structured (interviewers read questions from a printed page). Four separate back to back interviews, each one with 2 team members and on a different topic. I got a very detailed document beforehand to help with preparing for the on site interviews
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Describe a project that you managed in the past - what were some challenges and how did handled them?