Skydio Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

The interview process involved meeting the Hiring Manager along with a Mini System Design round, followed by a 1-hour Technical Screen focusing on Linear Algebra and Quantitative Coding. The final stage was an Onsite, which included Presentation, Behavioral, Coding, and Design rounds. The presentation seemed a bit out of place for a non-research role, and honestly, they changed the job description the day before. It felt like the team wasn't totally sure what they were looking for in an engineer or the team's focus. On the plus side, everyone was really nice, and the problems were quite engaging, covering a mix of robotics and software engineering.

This was the worst interview process ever. So many meetings and interviews, plus unnecessary slide presentations. Interviewers were late or canceled meetings after they started, showing no respect for anyone's time. I had a bad feeling when they wanted to schedule over 9 hours of meetings, and I should have trusted it. It's crazy how many good candidates they must scare away! Having 3-7 employees in interviews for up to 9 hours each, not being productive, seems insane and a waste of resources. It looks like Skydio is chaotic and can't make decisions. Not letting managers hire people shows how the company is run. Being in Silicon Valley means high salaries that are still low for the area for critical roles. User experience with their drones gets mixed reactions, and the news about their failure in Ukraine makes sense after seeing this peek into the company.

They had me talk about my previous work for about 30 minutes and also asked me some random questions on linear algebra and computational complexity. There was also a coding test focused on data structures and algorithms using C++.