Unbabel Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

The process included a get-to-know-you chat, a technical interview, and an interview with the management team. The technical part was fairly straightforward, but the problem statement had some ambiguity.

Scheduling the interview took days, so we decided to go with an offline challenge instead. I didn't get clear feedback on why my solution wasn't accepted, and I think maybe junior people reviewed it. I felt like just a number, and they ignored me instead of answering my questions.

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.