Candidates applying for Staff Systems Engineer roles take an average of 22 days to get hired, when considering 2 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Shield AI overall takes an average of 26 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Shield AI as a Staff Systems Engineer according to 2 Glassdoor interviews include:
Skills test: 22%
Phone interview: 22%
One on one interview: 22%
Group panel interview: 22%
Presentation: 11%
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I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Shield AI in Mar 2023
Interview
30 minute phone screening where recruiter asks you to go in depth on some resume items. Was recommended for a Zoom interview which took about an hour and asked me to give in depth explanations on my MBSE experience. Was then recommended for another Zoom interview which also took about an hour and asked very similar questions to the first Zoom interview. Was then recommended for on-site final interview and asked to prepare a presentation on a challenge problem. The challenge problem was essentially a small handful of top level requirements for a UAV and was asked to present a solution and show requirement derivation, block diagrams, interfaces, a SEMP. On-site interview was a series of 4 one hour interviews. Technical interview was very similar to Zoom interviews, teamwork and value interviews were more “how would you handle x situation”, “what values are important to you”, etc. The presentation interview was a little strange as the panel seemed annoyed to see that requirements had quantifiable parameters in them i.e. “… shall have no less than/no more than X [parameter units]…”. Didn’t seem to appreciate the “Design” part of Systems Design/Architecture and thought that specialty design engineers (ME, EE) should be given requirements that do not even slightly try to bound the solution space. The core team I spoke to throughout the process were hinting that I’d get an offer but surprisingly didn’t receive one. I think my presentation put some of the virtual panel folks off as they were debating me on almost all my derived requirements as to whether “they were too much in the solution space”, but I also think they were just trying to find reasons to debate as it got to the point where one was asking me why I specified minimum update rate rather than maximum lag rate and I pointed out they’re just the inverse of each other, so be prepared to get many questions on the presentation! All in all, not a terrible interview process but surely a lengthy one and somewhat excessive.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Shield AI
Interview
HR Screen:phone > Hiring Manager: virtual > Technical with team members: virtual > 4 hour on-site with a presentation.
Nothing too difficult but more technical than your average defense contractor interview. Lots of repetitive questions due to the multiple interviewers. They expect you to work 50+ hour weeks, most (90%) work is on-site. Most of the interviewers were nice and professional, however the whole process seemed a bit excessive.
The pay doesn’t seem worth the amount of hours you’ll be putting in each week. RSUs are useless unless they are bought out or IPO (who knows when that’ll happen). It’s a young company still figuring things out which can be exciting, depends on your personality.
I would consider them again once the company matures, maybe in a few years.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
High level MBSE questions, values/behavioral questions, teamwork questions. Had to put together a 30min presentation for the on-site. This was based on developing a new product, focusing on MBSE (create a BDD, describe approach to various system engineering development processes)