GRAIL Interview Questions
& Process

The interview process for this senior computational biologist role was quite lengthy. It involved a mix of statistical and data-science questions, LeetCode-style coding challenges, and questions focused on biology. While I found the data-science questions to be thoughtful and relevant to the role, I felt that including LeetCode questions was a bit unusual for computational biologist positions. Many in my field don't practice these types of questions, and I believe this approach might cause the company to overlook many excellent candidates who aren't familiar with LeetCode. The overall interview duration was also a bit longer than I would have preferred.

I sent in my application online and got a call from the recruiter the very next day. They went over my resume and asked a couple of things. About two weeks after that, the recruiter shot me an email saying I was moving on to the Hiring Manager stage. The Hiring Manager chatted about my experience and asked some general data engineering questions. Later that same day, I moved to a panel interview, where I met with several folks from different teams over the course of two days. The panel interviews were pretty chill, and everyone was really nice and knew their stuff. There were a few technical parts, and then questions about my background and resume. All in all, it was a good experience, even though I didn't get the offer because I didn't quite meet what they were looking for.

I applied for a Senior Software Test Engineer role in February 2024 and had a recruiter call about a week later. The recruiter conversation went well, they told me about the next steps and that I was a great fit. They mentioned connecting me with the director, hiring manager, and other team members to move forward. However, like others have noted, the recruiter totally ghosted me afterwards. My follow-up emails and LinkedIn messages got no reply. This ghosting is super unprofessional and a waste of candidate time. My view of GRAIL's recruitment process has really gone down.

I applied online and got a call back the next day, and they set up a screening interview for the following week. On the day of the interview, the recruiter messaged me 20 minutes after it was supposed to start saying she had to reschedule, which we did. The screening interview was straightforward and led to an interview with the hiring manager the week after. That interview was quite easy; she mostly asked about my background. I didn't hear back until the end of the next week, when they scheduled a 'virtual on-site interview.' This last interview was three hours long, with several short interviews with different team members who were very nice. They all inquired about my experience and shared details about their projects and roles. I was told to expect an update the following week, but it's been two weeks and no word, despite a follow-up email. I'm pretty disappointed to get this far and then be ghosted. I wish they'd communicate better.