Unbabel Interview Questions
& Process

So I applied and they got back to me about interviewing. I got a link to schedule with a recruiter. I scheduled it but they didn't show up. I emailed them and they said their system didn't add it to their calendar, which was weird but fine. We rescheduled for an hour later. I passed the recruiter call and then I got an email to prep for my case study presentation. I presented my case study. The interview was rough, the interviewer kept pointing out my inexperience and making assumptions. They asked about my experience in a degrading way. They asked me 'because my title switched every company, what was my actual experience doing

There were 4 stages in the interview. It started with an HR call, followed by a meeting with the hiring manager. Next was a team discussion that included a presentation, and the final round was with the VP of sales. Even though the interview process was stopped due to an internal restructure, it was a good experience overall. The people were very nice and made me feel great throughout the process. Instructions and feedback were clear, and they were supportive.

The interview process spanned two months and involved about 5 to 6 stages. First, an HR screening took a week to set up and another week for feedback, which I had to chase. Then, a take-home test took a week to complete and another week to evaluate, bringing the total to over a month before scheduling developer meetings. The developer meeting happened after that, with feedback delayed by two weeks due to holidays. Following that, I had a meeting with the PM and PO in the same week, where I was asked about my experience and behaviors and expressed my interest in the tech stack and team. The process concluded with a final HR call to discuss feedback, where I was initially told I passed and an offer with relocation sponsorship was being prepared. However, the next day, HR informed me that due to a difficult situation and directives from HQ in the USA concerning widespread layoffs, relocation to the Portugal HQ was halted. This was very disappointing, as their feedback process seemed lacking and they made an offer that was subsequently withdrawn. Overall, it was a lengthy interview process with a big EU tech company, but ultimately a waste of my time and the team's time.

Getting an interview with Unbabel wasn't easy. After a first 30min chat with HR and sending in my technical challenge solution, they got in touch two weeks later to set up engineer interviews. Lots of back and forth, and they even canceled last minute a couple times, which in hindsight was a red flag. This whole scheduling part took over a month. Finally, I had two technical interviews, each with two people from different teams. The first one was rough. I even questioned if I was in the wrong meeting or applied for the wrong role because the questions didn't quite fit the job description. One interviewer, maybe the hiring manager, seemed super bored and uninterested in my technical challenge submission. They asked these 'gotcha' questions without follow-ups, not really engaging. They seemed unfamiliar with vectorization, thinking it was threading, and misunderstood 'software features' as 'feature extraction from data'. The other interviewer asked a random question about research. It was awkward. I also asked about handling market bugs and retrospectives, and they said they don't do that because there are no official releases, just code pushes, so customers don't notice bugs. This made me wonder about their root cause analysis and if customer requests influence feature development. The second interview with a different pair of interviewers was pretty normal, though. It was clear I wouldn't be a good fit and would have communication issues, so I withdrew my application.