Kinaxis has a very automated and an impersonal interview process. Call me old-fashioned, but when I interviewed people I would book my own meeting and communicate with the candidates myself. The only time you were contacted by a human was during question and answer portions. I had applied to Kinaxis several times over the years through the standard careers site and never received a response, despite a PhD in operations research from a school they recruit at and twenty years of relevant experience. The only path that worked was a direct introduction to someone inside the company. If you are applying cold, expect the resume to disappear. Round 1 was a 1:1 with the hiring manager. It was a substantive conversation. He described the actual problem the team was trying to solve: moving from heuristic solvers to MIP formulations, hitting a vertical scaling wall on a single large server, and needing someone who could take them to a decomposition-based approach. He also surfaced an organizational gap — a sister ML team that the OR side had not been able to engage technically. The role he described was architect-level: set direction, bridge two teams, push past a ceiling the current team cannot get past on its own. Round 2 was 45 minutes, hybrid format — one senior engineering manager on video, one director in the room. The questions were almost entirely depth-on-current-practice: walk us through a formulation you wrote, walk us through a decomposition you applied, explain the mechanics of the technique your PhD thesis used (in my case, work that is 19 years old). One interviewer checked his watch about thirty minutes in. In my mind there was a mismatch that senior candidates should be aware of. An architect or principal-level hire is evaluated for judgment, breadth, and the ability to set direction across teams. That is a different bar from "can you, today, formulate a problem on a whiteboard and recall the mechanics of Lagrangean relaxation under questioning." There is reason why I moved on from old technologies to new technologies and I don't regret not using something like Gurobi anymore. The rejection arrived the day after round 2. I was relieved.