Flagship Pioneering Interview Questions
& Process

So after I had my interview with the hiring manager, I then went through this really frustrating experience of ghosting. It was pretty disheartening to have gone through the interview process, only to end up with no follow-up communication at all. I was really looking forward to some feedback, good or bad, but I was just left hanging without any response or word on a decision about my application. This whole lack of communication made it tough to keep going with my job search and left me wondering what the outcome was and why. So yeah, that's what happened.

It was a typical interview process. The people were nice. The final round was a long take-home assignment with two parts. It was a negative experience because a week and a half after I sent the take-home, I got a generic rejection email on a Saturday morning. They didn't give a specific reason why I didn't move forward. The recruiting team was careless towards applicants, and I don't think free take-home work should be expected from an 'innovative' company.

The whole thing took about 10 weeks. My first chats and getting things set up with the recruiter went fine, where I made it clear I'm really into being a Cloud engineering individual contributor, not so much leadership, but I'm keen to learn. Then I talked to the technical cofounder and did a third-party technical interview, both seemed super into it. A few days later, the recruiter was pushing for an onsite, so I met the rest of the company subsidiary, all under NDA, and it felt pretty good. After that, I touched base with the recruiter again about salary and timing, and also chatted with the director of cloud engineering for the main company. The director was walking his dog on a busy street in NYC, so he didn't seem super engaged. The recruiter said he'd let me know by the end of the week if they wanted to proceed. Two weeks later, after I followed up, they went with someone else, saying they'd be interested in me for a role in 3-6 months. Just less than a week after getting rejected, I saw they posted a devops job that really seemed to match what I discussed with them. Initially, I was really excited, but now I'm a bit put off by how disorganized and unproactive they were. I probably won't look at roles here again because of this.

The first part had two interviews, a Spark Hire video one and then a 1-on-1 with someone from Flagship Pioneering. I just did the Spark Hire video interview. It has 6 questions, and you get 1-3 minutes for each. You can take your time thinking about answers before recording, and you get two tries for each question. You have 48 hours to record everything. It's a good idea to really plan your responses since there's no time limit once you see the question before you start recording. Just a heads-up on how Spark Hire works: you can leave the interview and come back later, but once you view a question, you can't close the browser. If you do, it'll count as a 'skipped question' and you won't be able to answer it.