I applied online. I interviewed at Poolside.ai (Texas City, TX) in May 2026
Interview
I had a the initial interview which was a just a conversation and had very little structure. The interviewer was very friendly and though we didn't get into technical questions during this round, I left feeling like I would likely get taken to next steps. Nope, didn't even get through my weekend without bad news. Completely at a loss as to why they rejected me after a positive first interview.
1
Difficult interview
Application
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Poolside.ai in Apr 2026
Interview
Pleasant process. No leetcode-like coding questions, very research oriented.
First, a screening call with the engineering lead, then two technical interviews followed by some culture fit calls. All coordinated by a hiring manager.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Very hard to generalize I think both technical interviews are tailored to the applicant.
First one is generally about the subject you would handle as a member of engineering, second one an overview of what the team you would be joining.
In my case this was questions with a researcher, discussion like around multiple aspects of the synthetic data generation in the first interview, and about the same around pre-training in the second.
I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Poolside.ai in Mar 2026
Interview
The entire process was very disappointing and ill-organized. The online job posting does not show any difference between roles (senior, junior etc...) After I applied online, I got scheduled in an initial call with a software engineer. He was clearly not happy to be hear, very grumpy and didn't talk a lot. I'm looking for a staff position but he was clearly more junior than me and wasn't able to answer any of my questions about the role or the expected compensation. To this day, neither the job description nor the initial call was able to let me understand if they're recruiting for a junior, a senior or a staff, and whether the compensation is 50k or 200k.
