1 - phone screening. I was impressed that the CEO called me!
2 - a quiz. Some really interesting and unique problems. took a couple of hours to solve at home. Free form answers, with the option to provide as much or as little detail as I wanted to. Submitted code.
3 - They called me in to go over my answers. Met with two data scientists, senior and junior, who asked me to explain how I solved each problem.
4 - Follow up call to let me know outcome.
Overall process to 2-3 weeks.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
They asked whether I had considered a simulation solution to what looked like a geometry problem
I applied through other source. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Rifiniti (Boston, MA) in Mar 2016
Interview
1 phone screen
1 take home
2nd phone interview (cancelled)
Undoubtedly most unpleasant interaction of the nearly twenty companies I interviewed with.
1st phone screen was a solid discussion of the structure and nature of Rifiniti's data with mostly a data engineering dimension.
The phone screener said that the take-home exercise would take 6 hours to complete. I considered it an unreasonable ask, and we agreed that I would provide a work sample and spend an hour on Rifiniti's take-home questions. When I received the questions, they were largely basic math problems that you can google but still would take 6+ hours to do well.
The Executive VP scheduled an interview, then cancelled the interview with <24 hours notice on account of the take home. As a extra bonus, the EVP replied with a personal insult.
I honestly think that Rifiniti has an interesting business opportunity providing analytics on office space utilization. This interview was remarkably disastrous, but I sometimes people have bad days. Both the EVP and I could have handled the situation better.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Outline an algorithm to find if two rectangles overlap. How would you compute the area if they overlap?
