One of the HRs from Intel had contacted me initially over telephone and via email for this position, based on my resume which was present already in Intel's internal systems, since I had previously done an internship there.
The initial conversation was mostly related to my interests and the details of the job description. He mentioned the hiring manager was interested in talking with me and so I had a telephonic interview with him in a week. He asked both technical and managerial related questions. Since the position was related to Big Data Analytics, BI and Enterprise Applications some of the typical questions asked were,
- How do you see Big Data affecting business and organizations in the next 5 years
- Typical Challenges related to current analytics, Machine Learning and BI techniques
- What would be your major pain points when designing an enterprise application
- Typical steps in building a machine learning \ statistical model
- How would you check if a model is performing well and what would you do to improve it
- How analytics can be used to leverage insights in businesses
- What are your typical expectations from your team members
- Expectations of how a manager should take care of his team
- Current Salary, Notice period etc.
After this round, since I had provided some references from my internship duration in Intel, he said he would directly connect me with a Technical Architect for the next round of interview in a couple of days. I received a call next week and this interview was a pure technical interview. I was mostly grilled regarding my current project at work, previous projects, skills and interests. Some interesting questions asked were,
- Typical challenges faced in unsupervised learning
- Differences between relational and non-relational ( noSQL ) databases
- Why choose noSQL for a particular project and why relational for another, what would be the difference if you used a different database
- Object oriented databases and how I used it in my project
- Twitter Analytics based on some of my projects
- Relational Databases, Normalization, why 3NF, 4NF, why not just 1 NF?
- Benefits of NoSQL databases like MongoDB
- Caching techniques and how they can be implemented in enterprise apps
- Some specific business case based problems
It was a really long interview but I guess he was quite satisfied with my responses and said I would need to come down to the office for a face to face interview sometime when I was free. The interview was set up for next week.
This was a face to face interview with the hiring manager again in their office. This was mostly a behavioral round where some of the questions he asked were,
- Where do you see yourself in 2 years
- Typical expectations from the job, team and manager
- What sets you apart from the rest
- If the job demands you to work extra hours are you up for the task?
- What if some of the technology you need to use is not familiar to you
- How was your experience working at Intel ( previously as an Intern )
- How much would you rate yourself technically out of 10
- Assuming we hire you when can we expect you to join us?
Considering the last question he asked me, I felt that the interview went pretty well and he said if everything goes well, one of the HRs will be contacting me with the compensation package and other details soon. I received an email and a call within 2 - 3 days with the details of the offered salary, benefits etc. After I confirmed these and filled out some details, I got the offer letter from the staffing department within a week via email.