There are 3 stages for sure and maybe a 4th: 1) A half hour HR screen which went smoothly. 2) A test case where they make you build a "production grade" API with a machine learning model behind it. This stage is why I'm rating my overall experience as negative. The time alloted for solving they claim its four days, but unfortunately if one wants to be exhaustive with the details and make it "production grade" it takes much more than that. These days some companies are throwing very time consuming projects which the candidates are expected to complete as if there was nothing else going on in their lives. The worse part, I got zero feedback and zero questions about the API. Quite annoying right? 3) A 2 hours technical interview with the Machine learning team which was quite fair where they ask general questions around Machine learning and make you suggest improvements to a Python module. 4) There may be a fourth stage which I didn't reach.

After a brief recruiter interview I was given an open-ended work assignment with no recommended time limit. This involved two inference tasks, supervised and unsupervised, using what looked like production Typeform data. However, they added API development and deep learning models as nice-to-haves. This was the first red flag—no respect for the interviewees time at all here. I timeboxed my work to 4 hours per task, ignoring the nice-to-haves as I felt they went far beyond expectations for a work exercise. I was told the team was "very impressed" with my submission in any case. I then did a two hour interview with two technical staff members to go through the exercise. I received pretty unprofessional comments during the interview and it gave me a bad feeling about the adequacy of the staff members to assess what I had done. For example, one interviewer claiming I should be using a Logistic Regression to predict a continuous variable, and telling me there was no need to remove covariant features as it was a waste of time, both were poor advice in the context of the task. They asked me why I had not submitted a deep learning solution, and I explained that in inference tasks I work up to more complex models from simpler ones, which is a common workflow, and that I had timeboxed the exercise. The follow up recruiter feedback was almost laughably unprofessional. I have a computing degree from a CS department that ranks at #10 worldwide, above Stanford, and 15 years of startup experience. The recruiter told me my "coding skills were lacking", that I did not complete the API assignment, and that I did not submit a deep learning solution, so they decided to reject me. This confirmed to me the completely amateur nature of the process. The job description did not even contain deep learning as a job requirement. By that stage I had already decided I would not consider an offer in any case, given my interview experience, but that just rounded it off. Typeform, please fix alignment between your job descriptions, recruiters, interviewers and work exercises for your ML roles! Candidates should not require 3 days to spare for unpaid work on production data. I should add that I have been rejected from interviews only twice in my career, and it has never felt me feeling bad at all, I just wasn't suitable for those roles and I felt the process was fair. Not so in this case, worst interview experience of my life.