Citrine Informatics Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

The interview included a technical phone screen with a senior engineer, followed by a take-home technical and written challenge that was quite enjoyable (creating a SI unit converter web app and writing an email to persuade the CTO to adopt CI/CD), and finally an on-site interview. The on-site consisted mostly of structured interviews with pre-written questions. It was less rigid than expected, especially since they provided a document detailing their process beforehand. They did a good job of giving insight into the company culture and assessing both technical and soft skills.

The citrine interview process for a software engineer is long, taking over 16 hours which isn't great for a candidate's time. They don't advertise upfront that it's a 12-hour process, which is double the usual length. They should be clear about the time commitment. They focus more on behavioral questions than technical skills. Their take-home test is supposed to take about 5 hours, which is impossible given the constraints: language restrictions, weird unicode characters and output formatting, API and dockerizing, unit tests, and automated testing. The main part, a parsing and DSL exercise, could easily take 5 hours by itself. Interviewers ask behavioral questions over Zoom in a robotic way, even apologizing for sounding scripted.

The interview process began with a 30-minute conversation with the in-house technical recruiter, followed by another 30-minute chat with the hiring manager. Afterwards, I was given a homework assignment, which I limited to 10 hours as recommended. The challenge was enjoyable, and I was quite pleased with my submission. The interactions up to that point had been very positive. After submitting the challenge, it took the company two weeks to respond. This was acceptable as they kept me informed and were generally responsive, and I understand that unforeseen circumstances arise. However, this morning, I received a standard rejection email from a no-reply address. I would have appreciated some feedback on my code, especially since it took a significant amount of time to complete. I'm unsure what might have been wrong with my code, as I was rather proud of it.