COMSOL Field / Application Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

So there were 3 stages in total. First, a phone interview where they hit me with technical questions. Then, a second interview which involved a presentation about a project I had done, and after that, a barrage of technical questions. They never once asked me about my resume or any behavioral stuff. The third interview, I got to play around with their software and prep two presentations for two tasks. I thought the final presentation would be about my presentation skills and giving COMSOL inductions, but nope, it was more technical questions, and honestly, I'm not sure what the point of the presentations even was. Such a waste of time and effort, and I totally wasn't ready for it. When I stumbled on a question, another interviewer would jump in, maybe to help, but they just made things more confusing and didn't let me think. One guy was definitely not good with people; even when it was clear I was going to bomb the third interview, he just kept asking questions, seemed like he just wanted to humiliate me. Total bully. I couldn't even answer basic questions, some of which I'd already answered in earlier rounds, because they were asking technical stuff again. I wish I had just walked away when I realized they were doing it again, especially since I already had another offer. And predictably, given their vibe, they never even got back to me with the outcome.

I found the job on Indeed and applied online. About two days later, I got an email to schedule a phone interview with an applications engineer. The phone interview was mostly technical, covering computational fluid mechanics, turbulence modeling, finite element programming, open-source software, and my research. It went okay, and they said they'd respond in a few days. About half an hour later, the hiring manager called and invited me for an onsite interview at the Comsol office. The onsite lasted about 3 hours. I had to give a presentation on my research and got a lot of technical questions about the math and numerical implementation, plus some fundamental numerics questions like the accuracy of Gudonov methods near a shock wave, which felt a bit dated. I even had to write out the steps for implementing the PISO algorithm on a whiteboard, which felt like a thesis defense. I also had one-on-one interviews with other applications engineers, the hiring manager, and more senior people, which were mostly technical and related to my research.

I applied for the job on the COMSOL website. About a week later, I got an email to set up a phone interview. The phone interview was about half an hour and mostly about my resume experience, not technical at all. That same week, I had an on-site interview that took about three hours. It included a presentation about my experience to two senior engineers and a case interview where they tested my ability to simplify problems into physical models and my understanding of basic concepts.