I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Pony.ai (Fremont, CA)
Interview
Phone screen:
Interviewer was 20 minutes late. Had a discussion of past work and was then asked to code quicksort.
Onsite:
A week later was asked to come onsite.
Standard 5 interviews(4 technical whiteboarding + 1 HR). It is very CS/coding heavy. So all data structures and algorithms. I was not too ready for this, so did not do that well.
Generally not too impressed with the people at Pony.AI. Some of the interviewers were quite rude. Would enter the room, not even give their name or introduce themselves, and just start firing off questions, and were somewhat hostile or unhelpful when I asked questions to them. I sometimes repeat the same questions for multiple people to gauge the different responses. And was flatly told that they could not disclose some trivial information, when the interviewer before had happily answered.
From my limited interaction with them it definitely seems like it has a very heavy Chinese company culture, so I don't know what it would be like to work for them.
Generally was quite indifferent then when the rejection email came.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
* Implement Quicksort
* Implement Max queue(returns max element)
* Describe an algorithm to check if two polygons overlap.
* Binary search rotated array
* Geometry problem
* Implement Min heap
Standard phone interview/screening; hour-long technical interview with Leetcode-style question, followed by a 4-hour long onsite with behavior/cultural fit and a systems architecture question. They were very interested in knowing how you would think about designing a system from the ground up and how you would solve problems
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Suppose you have a series of readings that represents values for speed. Return the length of the longest continuous interval where the difference between the largest and smallest value does not exceed a certain value.
normal technical interview with 4 round on-site. the coding question is hard or medium, and there is also system design questions. after the interview, it is ghosted for 2 weeks
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
some hard dp questions and image processing system design
first we have a phone interview about coding problem, and then need to join 4 rounds onsite virtual interview about coding and system design questions, from medium to hard difficulty.
Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Pony.ai with 3.3 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 20% positive. To compare, the company-average is 27.8% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Software Engineer roles take an average of 16 days to get hired, when considering 25 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Pony.ai overall takes an average of 13 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Pony.ai as a Software Engineer according to 25 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 44%
Presentation: 19%
One on one interview: 15%
IQ intelligence test: 7%
Other: 4%
Drug test: 4%
Group panel interview: 4%
Background check: 4%
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