Initially seemed like a professional company and very positive but then ghosted me after the onsite and completely ignored follow up emails, very unprofessional. This was despite receiving a call directly after the onsite to tell me they were very happy and think I was "exceptional". Completely ignored me after that, rude and unprofessional.
The interviews themselves weren't particularly hard, except for one, the only one that went badly where I was asked to solve the Mastermind problem algorithmically. A problem completely outside of the scope of the job, and not something you can solve on a white board in 40 minutes.
The only issue was the length of interviews, two full days, 10 interviews.
A call with a recruiter about general fit, followed by a tech call with an architect to talk about general technical background with some specific tech questions (very specific like static inner class vs static class), then flown out for 2 days of interviews; mix of coding, demos and background.
Overall it seemed positive, but the ghosting left a bad taste and I would not want to work for a company that treated candidates like that.
There's also a bit of an attitude of "we're very special at Ab Initio, we're different here" which you're told quite often.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Ab Initio (Lexington, MA) in Apr 2014
Interview
Phone interview, 2 on-site full day interview, one special meeting with the engineering VP.
Overall the process was very smooth. The interview covered every aspects, from details of my resume to programming questions. People are very positive and knowledgeable of their field. I felt that the engineers are very good people and the coaches are very personable. The long interview process was, in my opinion, a good thing to ensure cultural fit.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
We discussed their products and talked about their potential needs and how I would solve the problem. In general I work better with well-defined problem, in this session I frequently found myself lost in confusion.
Senior Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Ab Initio with 3 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 100% positive. To compare, the company-average is 47.6% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Senior Software Engineer roles take an average of 28 days to get hired, when considering 1 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Ab Initio overall takes an average of 24 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Ab Initio as a Senior Software Engineer according to 1 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 25%
Group panel interview: 25%
Background check: 25%
One on one interview: 25%
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