So many red flags. I applied for the position online and went into the first interview with a recruiter where he went over the job description again, but was unable to answer any questions about the role, company, or the potential team (first red flag). I passed this and my resume was sent to a higher-level employee, where I was asked in-depth questions about my resume. I didn't mind this round and the interviewer seemed friendly.
The following round was one of the worst interviews I've ever had. It was scheduled for 30 minutes, the interviewer joined and immediately said it would take one hour, and then jumped into questions. He didn't bother exchanging pleasantries or even telling me his name or position. He went on to ask every question about Computer Science and software engineering under the sun, and a couple of data science questions. This was for a data scientist position, and the questions asked included how to create a multithreaded application in Python, and a description of every major data structure (Trees, Tries, Hashmap, Heaps, Stack, List, LinkedList, Hashset, etc). The interview went over 2 hours and I had to cancel my other appointments for that day since it was taking so long. In the end, the interviewer wanted to leave before I had the chance to answer any questions (I didn't give long-winded answers but I was able to answer everything). I finally got the chance to ask his position and some questions like how he stayed up to date with advancements in Deep Learning & NLP (the role specifically mentioned both of these), he essentially said he hasn't learned anything new in Data Science since the early 2000s and it was even needed for this position since all they do is .fit() and .predict(). This is a HUGE RED FLAG for any company, especially one that is hiring a data scientist. The interviewer was the lead data scientist on another team and hadn't held any data science or research positions before his current role. The two highlights were him telling me I wasn't good enough for Coupa (despite passing this stage and going on to the next one), and him asking about Kubernetes and then questioning how I knew about Kubernetes. He didn't ask to explain a concept or talk about how I used it but he didn't believe that I had experience with Kubernetes even though I described using Minikube for local testing and Azure's variant of Kubernetes to scale an API used for prediction. The next round had 2 data scientists who were slightly nicer but still left a lot to be desired.
By this point, I had another offer so I wasn't motivated to deal with bad interviews but I went in with an open mind. The first interviewer asked surface-level questions about deep learning (ie: RNN vs Transformer) but didn't ask any questions to showcase real knowledge of deep learning (model selection, what embeddings are, why we use optimizers instead of vanilla a gradient descent, etc.). The interview proceeded to argue with me about one of the projects I did in my current role, saying that it wouldn't have an impact on my company. Yes, he believe that he knew more about my current company than I did (I checked Linkedin and he had never worked there). Then they asked brain teaser questions- I wasn't motivated to solve them by the attitude of the interview and the lack of knowledge he showed so I didn't even try to solve them. BTW this interview was at 6:00 am PST because he was located in another country and said that I would often have to take meetings at very early or very late hours like this (another huge red flag). The second interview was 1.5 hours later and was mediocre but the interviewer didn't seem interested. They did a strange exercise where I had to create a database and then write a SQL query, but they didn't state what the database was for or the query until after I had explained it. They never asked me to write anything down and wanted me to explain the exact syntax of a SQL query. I've had many other interviews at top tech companies (Apple, Zoom, Microsoft, etc.) and this was a first. That was supposed to be the final or one of the final rounds (the interviewer said there would be 6 rounds in total + the hiring manager at the end, another red flag). I received a rejection two weeks later. As a bonus, I asked about learning initiatives in the AI/ML org (paper reading groups, Coursera/continuing learning programs, etc.), and they said they haven't had time to set up any despite being around for 5+ years.
TLDR: A huge number of red flags, seems like an alright company to the coast but wouldn't recommend it if you have ambitions.