I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Nervana Systems (Santa Clara, CA) in Jun 2017
Interview
Interviewed onsite at their SD office after clearing phone screens, had 5 rounds with the core Nervana team. It was a great experience,multiple questions on my projects and few coding questions. I was looking for entry-level positions and did not possess some of their requirements(LLVM). Came out feeling positive about a offer, given my GPU/CUDA and Machine learning background. Since I preferred a Santa Clara based position, I was asked for another short interview with SC team. The hiring manager in Santa Clara was nice and knowledgeable, but the other two interviewers were not. One member seemed to have no ML or GPU background and kept asking me about a basic ML algorithm, that I had to explain on board without even getting to its GPU implementation. He also did not understand core GPU concepts that I was trying to explain about my project. I could guess this from some of the questions he asked. He also asked about sort implementations in GPU, which is well known to be a CPU-efficient algorithm, but I tried to do a possible GPU implementation of Mergesort. He seemed satisfied although it was inefficient.
The second interviewer kept quizzing about Dist. Systems, even after I stated specifically that I dont have a background/coursework in it. She also asked about something related to array appending without being clear about the question and changing it and contradicting herself multiple times. She was not clear if it is a array concat or array extending or something else, although I explained the time complexity through amortized analysis. Also she kept asking for a more efficient implementation which seemed to be more at a system level kind of code although i could not any such thing after coming home and googling. Finally when the interview came to end, I asked what would be a good solution as per her- she replied "go look up online" and left room without any greeting or basic courtesy- was overall very rude and made me uncomfortable. She seemed to be a new hire from within Intel and not a Nervana core team member, as it was clear from her attitude. Overall it was positive experience and I really enjoyed talking to the Nervana team, except for couple of the Santa Clara people that I met with. Disappointed that I did not make it after they being so positive and asking me to choose teams etc, felt like I was strung along and then let go randomly.