J'ai postulé via un recruteur. Le processus a pris 5 semaines. J'ai passé un entretien chez Blue Origin (Cincinnati, OH) en juin 2023
Entretien
The interview itself was pretty straightforward. I had a one hour phone screen with the hiring authority and at the end asked if he had any reservations thst I could do the job and he said he did not. A followup more extensive interview at which I had to write and present a 1 hour pitch about myself. At the end I was told I’d hear something in a week. After almost four weeks of silence, I had to run them to get a “not interested.” Ignoring people who devoted several hours for preparation and the interview itself is just plain rude.
J'ai passé un entretien chez Blue Origin (Kent, WA)
Entretien
Thorough group interview with panel of 5 people followed by 1:1 interviews. Had to submit an essay. Questions included checks on technical competency. You better be able to prove you know your profession.
Questions d'entretien [1]
Question 1
Demonstrate knowledge of vector mechanics and metal phase diagrams
J'ai postulé via un recruteur. Le processus a pris 2 semaines. J'ai passé un entretien chez Blue Origin (Seattle, WA)
Entretien
Interview process was a phone screen and an onsite interview that was mostly a group interview. The interview was great and I left with a very good impression of company wanting to accept the offer, provided it was competitive. But HR basically botched it and made a very poor offer that I ended up declining. My offer was for 130k with 30k signing bonus as a Senior Engineer. The base salary isn't too bad but for a private company that doesn't provide early bonuses or even any sort of equity, it isn't competitive. They seem to offer a 401k with 3% match and an industry standard 401k with 3% match.
As for interview process, the session begins with a 1.5 hour group meeting with the team leads + CTO and some other folks who basically pepper your about your previous work. Nothing technical in this part, it's more a measure of how comfortable you're in group dynamics and how well you can explain the work that you've done.
Then there's a 1 HR group lunch with the team that you'd be joining, which is nice. It let's you get a glimpse at the people you'd be working with directly.
After the lunch the technical parts being. I was asked to write effectively a bit stream parser that had some start of a unique start code followed by a fixed size pay load. Your vanilla FSMs was the right answer.
On the whole there are a lot of questions about building fault tolerant safety systems, which IMHO is usually weird to most people who really haven't worked in such a field. I just winged my way through it, and apparently did pretty well.
All in all it looks like a really cool company to work at.
CONS:
- Honestly, the HR at the company...is less than ideal. If they had been more transparent with how much they'd be willing to pay me, I wouldn't have wasted my time and their money by going out to an onsite interview. My minimum was well beyond their maximum.
- They follow up on your references. The kicker: one of the references must be your manager. WTF. Luckily I had a former manager (who barely remember my existence) I routed them to, but what kind of policy is this? I'm just posting this so people are aware (it might be a dealbreaker to some) and would be willing to drop out of the interview process for this, this sort of policy is ludicrous and shouldn't be encouraged.
Questions d'entretien [1]
Question 1
Prepare for questions about fault tolerant systems, as in how you'd design one. The question posed to me was, "How would you design a completely automated roller coaster that had no humans controlling it?"
