I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Munich Re (Toronto, ON) in Feb 2020
Interview
Applied for the position of AI Software Engineer.
First got a phone interview, chatted with the recruiter and asked about my experience, skills, etc. Then got an invitation to an onsite interview. Up to this point, my impression of the team has been positive, but things turned south since the onsite interview.
The onsite had two interviewers including the recruiter I talked to earlier. The other one is an AI engineer who works on the team. I mostly talked to the engineer and he asked me mostly about my past projects and some conceptual technical questions. I believe I gave very prepared answers to all the questions and really showed them my strong background in the field. One of the questions was a system design question and I proposed a solution using the K-means algorithm; however, the engineer guy said he was expecting me to tell him the problem is unsolvable since ”too many factors were involved in the problem”. I would consider this is one of those “dick moves” an interviewer can pull out to a candidate, if you know the question is unsolvable why do you ask?
Anyway, after the onsite, I was given a coding assessment (two LC easy). I solved all the questions and passed all the tests. In the end, I received an email from the recruiter telling me that the team changed the hiring direction and would not consider me anymore.
In summary, I did everything I could and performed well in the hiring process but got turned down because the team doesn’t know what they really want for a candidate. I wasted two weeks of time for nothing. Here is my observation of the AI & Data Science team at Munich Re (Toronto office): the people who are in charge of the technical aspect don’t have a strong technical background and have never built anything of production-grade; this is observed from my interaction with the engineer interviewer. I would advise anyone who seeks a long-term career in applied machine learning or data science to avoid this company.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
how do you tackle overfitting during training a machine learning model
I applied through college or university. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Munich Re (Princeton, NJ) in Mar 2020
Interview
4 rounds of interview, the First one in via phone and others are onsite about 25 min each.
Mostly asked SQL and OOP in tech questions. half tech and half behavior. All of them are nice people.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Use SQL to select people's salary in a specific rank in different Dept. write by hand.
I applied online and within 24 hours I received a link to do an online job assessment test. It was about 60 mins and quite okay to do. For the next 24 hrs I didn't receive an automatic rejection and assumed I passed the test. The following business day received an email from HR saying that my application is very interesting and that they are still trying to match applications to available positions. About a week later I received a rejection email stating that my specialised expertise (i.e biomedical science and epidemiology) does not match any available positions. I am frustrated at the fact that they advertise a position wanting a person with biomedical experience and epidemiology but turn around and say that there are no available positions....and yet the job is STILL being advertised. Makes me think if my national origin didn't play any part in that rejection.