Charles River Analytics Interview Questions
& Process

The interview was pretty quick. We mostly talked about the company and then I was asked one or two behavioral questions. It was a good interview, and I felt like I was able to show them what I can do and what I offer.

So, for this Research Engineer role in Sensing, Perception, and Applied Robotics, I went through a couple of interview rounds. First up was a chat with the hiring manager and a senior software engineer. After that, they liked my profile and invited me for a virtual on-site. This involved preparing a 45-minute presentation on a past research project, ready for a Q&A session. The actual virtual on-site was a full day of back-to-back 30-minute interviews with about 8 different people from the team, including Research Scientists, the Engineering Director, and other Software Engineers. The presentation was scheduled right in the middle of the day for roughly 15 employees to attend.

After the initial testing/screening, I had two phone interviews that went well. HR said they were moving forward and asked about my availability for an on-site interview. Three HR staff contacted me to schedule the final interview. One of them emailed me using the wrong name, which was an honest mistake. They initially planned to fly me in for an on-site interview, but a week later, it changed to a 4-hour Skype interview. A week before the scheduled Skype interview, they apparently canceled it. However, I never received the email because HR sent it to the wrong address. It wasn't until two days after the missed interview, after I emailed my contacts, that they realized their error. I was told they were 'going in a different direction.' I was surprised by how disorganized HR was for a company with such a good reputation.

It was the first round, a Zoom interview with one interviewer who seemed inexperienced. They didn't know basic coding terms and couldn't answer my questions. They criticized my SQL command for being different from how they'd do it and my simple Python script without good reasons. The interview ended early, felt like a waste of time.