I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at PolyAI in Aug 2024
Interview
First, I had a brief chat with a manager, followed by a take-home assessment. After that, I had two live-coding interviews, and the process wrapped up with a conversation with one of the co-founders. All of the interviewers were approachable and made me feel comfortable throughout, and as a recent graduate, it was refreshing to see a lot of young faces. The entire process was smooth and felt much less tedious/stressful than other interview processes I've been through (which I think was mostly due to the person coordinating the whole process —they were responsive and a pleasure to work with).
I applied online. I interviewed at PolyAI (London, England) in Aug 2025
Interview
Applied on Linkedin, got invited to a recruiter screen,had a good converstation with the recruiter, they mentioend a take home coding task next and described it as "straightforward", it was actually 4 questions, 2 easy questions, 1 medium and 1 hard all within 60 minutes. I did them all and had 2/6 test cases failing on the hard question, got an email after giving me an 86% score.
That question specifically seemed to be intentionally setup to be frustrating as the environment errored when any debug print statements were added (only on that question) and a video animation played on half the screen on every test run.
The recruiter then said they reviewed my submission for the coding task and asked for my availability for the next interview, which I sent for the following week. I hadn't received an update by mid-week so I updated my availability and sent the recruiter an email.
The recruiter then sent me a generic rejection letter. I'm not too concerned with the exercise being difficult, but more disappointed that the recruiter (or the team) would invite me to an interview and then change their mind, The recruiter also did not send the task until I emailed to ask about it.
Thank you for taking the time to share your experience in detail. We’re glad to hear you found the initial conversations positive, but we’re sorry the later stages felt frustrating and that our communication fell short. We take feedback like this seriously as we work to ensure our process is both fair and consistent, and we’ll use your input to improve.
Intro call, take home task, 2 technical interviews (algorithm and api), final call with co-founder.
Take home task and api interview were somewhat easy, algorithm interview was average (needed data structure knowledge).
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Look at this documentation for the api of a known website and code something that does using it.
