Canoo Interview Questions
& Process

The interview process was pretty smooth, not too many questions. It started with a recruiter call, then I had an interview with the manager, and then with the team. Overall, there were three interviews, and it moved quickly. In total, there were two main interview stages after the initial HR call.

Recruiter reached out who was located really far away. Instead of focusing on interview prep, I had constant company pitch calls every other day. The recruiter kept telling me how great Canoo is and why I should join. Communication was all over the place - texts, LinkedIn, emails - it was stressful to keep up. The interview with the director and hiring managers was okay and gave a good first impression. However, the second round with the program manager and systems engineer was disorganized, and one of them was rude and pushy. A few days after that interview, my recruiter called at 1:48 AM. I didn't answer since my phone is on Do Not Disturb at night. I saw the missed call the next morning and tried to reach out, but I was ghosted.

The Hiring Manager set up the interview with a senior/lead engineer for a phone screen. The call, scheduled for an hour, ended up going for about 1.5 hours. The interviewer seemed eager to get through as many questions as possible. They gave a couple of coding questions that they said should take under 10 minutes. Then there was a virtual onsite with 5 rounds. Four of those rounds had two engineers asking questions, and one round was just with the hiring manager. Overall, it was a good interview experience, and the questions were relevant to the job.

So I had this ~10 minute phone screen first. Then, the next week, I had a technical phone interview that was an hour long. I didn't make it past that technical phone interview, so I never got to the virtual panel interview part. The technical phone interview was all about common embedded software stuff, like SPI vs. I2C, or what happens when an interrupt fires. I felt like I answered most of them pretty well, maybe around 75%, and they all seemed pretty fair for the job. But, even though I thought I did okay, I got an email a few days later saying I wasn't moving on. Honestly, I wasn't too upset because I found out during the interview that they use VectorCast for testing their embedded software, and I really, really don't want to use that tool ever again.