Professional team, but the assessment process feels outdated for an AI role
Pros:
- Respectful Process: The team was professional and organized throughout.
- Good Take-Home: The take-home project was fair, well-scoped, and representative of actual work quality.
- Feedback: The team offered a feedback call after the rejection (rare and appreciated).
Cons:
- Artificial Constraints: The live coding environment prohibits modern tools (Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT, documentation). For an AI-focused company, banning the tools that define modern engineering feels like a missed opportunity to evaluate real world workflow.
- Signal Mismatch: There is a disconnect between the take-home and the live rounds. Candidates invest time in a substantial, practical take-home project, yet the hiring decision seems to filter primarily on algorithm recall rather than the engineering skills demonstrated in the work sample.
- Outdated Patterns: The live coding optimizes for memorizing specific algorithm patterns rather than the problem-solving or iterative testing used in actual product development.
- Industry Comparison: Competitors like Labelbox or Roboflow evaluate via pair programming on real deployment tasks. This process feels closer to generic Big Tech gatekeeping than a modern AI startup assessment.
Advice to Management:
- Weight the take-home project more heavily. It is a much better indicator of the candidate's actual output than the algorithm rounds.
- Update the live coding to reflect modern engineering constraints (i.e., allow AI tools/docs) to see how candidates actually ship code.
Advice to Candidates:
- Prepare for the Algo Filter: The live coding acts as a hard gatekeeper, even a great take-home won't save you if you fail here. Drill classic LeetCode Medium patterns (especially Matrix/Graph problems) and prioritize this over polishing your project.
- Simulate the Constraints: You will be coding without your modern stack (Cursor, Claude, etc.). Practice solving problems in a raw environment without AI or auto-complete to avoid being slowed down by the artificial restrictions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Standard LeetCode style matrix manipulation algorithm (e.g. in-place rotation).
Given take home task. I misunderstood the brief - went for speed of implementation rather than optimization. Task was interesting and I was given quality feedback afterwards despite not passing the round
I applied through other source. I interviewed at Encord (London, England) in Apr 2026
Interview
A take home test. My main issue with the company is that I've spent time completing the take home test, and they came back to me with a run-of-the-mill rejection letter.
