I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Propeller in Jan 2025
Interview
Interview process started with a screening core with an internal recruiter. Second round was meeting with CTO where they wanted to find out more about your experience and understand whether you will be a good fit for the company - mainly looking for someone who can take what the CTO has built and uplift it.
I don't think the CTO who interviewed me really understood what the data engineering position entailed and I could tell he was very very unprepared for this interview as his questions was random, and shot each question at you.
From the interview experience, the interview left me feeling like the person who interviewed me lack quite social skills (from the amount of times he kept interrupting me and stopping me mid-answer to wave me off to move onto next topic].
I think it is often important to remind these people that they aren't Elon Musks and they are only a manager of a small product company. Overall, I didn't feel like this position made sense for me because you will be reporting directly to this CTO, and because you are taking over his framework/code, he will be expecting higher standards from you and will never be satisfied. The interview ended with him asking technical questions completely unrelated to the jobs and experience required within the job description of data engineering -> i.e. What is a Python global interpreter lock?
Clearly wants a ChatGPT person who lives soley in the books and aren't pragmatic/practical in data engineering platform builds but rather comes off as focused on pedantic details that provides 0 value.
Overall 6/10 experience. Recruiter screening the call was very nice, welcoming and inspired me to do some research into their product which was very data-centric.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What is a global interpreter lock in Python? What is multithreading?