I applied online. I interviewed at Quaero (Bengaluru) in Mar 2019
Interview
The interview process was not so long. There were four rounds after the initial HR discussion.
The first three round was kind of discussion in last round it was a hands-on test round. Surprisingly the interviewER came with a primitive engineering mindset he did not ask any question related to product management or product engineering. like
How to create the product road map?
How to identify technology gaps?
what are the technology improvement scopes?
How to develop a feature to compete with competitive products in the market?
How to develop the seamless ci/cd pipeline with components?
How to play around with various aspects of data pipelines?
How to create an automated testing framework?
How to integrate product components and services to achieve resiliency and robustness?
How to conceptualise the appropriate services, then what will be the service interaction endpoints or how the services will interact programmatically?
How to set up authentication and authorization mechanisms?
How to implement tools for operational excellence?
How to write codes for the authentication and authorization server?
How to convert the product as a Saas offering. What technological challenges may come and how to handle those?
How to maintain tenant isolation at identity, application and data level?
How to develop the product to have lambda architecture in place for Bigdata use cases?
How to implement data quality and data governance?
The questions may be around Spark and Kafka programming as those are most critical for any analytical products
Methods for various data serialization and encryption aspects
Handling PII information aspects
Methods of Data Security and other mechanism related to Data protection and mechanism
(There could be a thousand questions like this)
I guess these should be the questions to ask to check the hands-on ground level skills for a Sr. Product Manager role,
Rather the technical expert asked questions like as follows:
have you written HIVE UDF, if yes how did u do that? How to add the jar in classpath.
what is the difference between MapReduce and spark no matter what answer I gave I was not able to satisfy the interviewer(and I also felt the interview was not so confident while asking the questions He was asking questions on every line you speak like typical negative interview mindset).
Few questions were regarding the no of files and size of files during spark and MapReduce processing. Asked some questions like did u use oozie and few other deprecated big data tools. When I pointed out that these are old and product teams don't use these any more rather they use in-house tools or some smarter tools, I got the reply that our product is old we use these tools only. Few questions were on the pom file of a spring-boot project few questions on java classpath(Not very smart and intelligent question to ask for a person applied for a Sr. Product manager role). When I pointed out that these are not relevant as one person has done these kinds of stuff six-seven years back they cannot give a proper theoretical answer for these questions the interviewer told I will ask these type of things only to check hands-on abilities. he was not able to give the ideal picture of their product deployment strategies and product offering. No question was asked which was relevant to product engineering or solution architecture or on modern big data development practices.
In my career, I have taken as well as gave many interviews at multiple levels both technical and inter-personal skill test kinds of interviews, never faced this kind of strange situation. Anyway, it was a fun experience however I never got a call back from them. But must mention the Hiring Product Manager and the Product leader were really gentle and cool.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
have you written HIVE UDF, if yes how did u do that? How to add the jar in classpath.
what is the difference between MapReduce and spark no matter what answer I gave I was not able to satisfy the interviewer(and I also felt the interview was not so confident while asking the questions He was asking questions on every line you speak like typical negative interview mindset).
Few questions were regarding the no of files and size of files during spark and MapReduce processing. Asked some questions like did u use oozie and few other deprecated big data tools. When I pointed out that these are old and product teams don't use these any more rather they use in-house tools or some smarter tools, I got the reply that our product is old we use these tools only. Few questions were on the pom file of a spring-boot project few questions on java classpath(Not very smart and intelligent question to ask for a person applied for a Sr. Product manager role).
I applied through a staffing agency. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Quaero (Charlotte, NC) in Oct 2018
Interview
Was given a solution as homework. Come to the interview with the solution completed to discuss how you accomplished it. Sounded like the employer wanted you to be able to work 24/7, and on holidays.
I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Quaero (Bengaluru) in Sept 2018
Interview
5 Rounds of interview.
Aptitude, GD, Listening skills test, Technical round and HR round.
Good company with a cool office and not to forget, they gave free lunch as well.