AI-Era Interviewing

⏱ 5 min read The major AI labs (Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepMind, Mistral, xAI, Cohere) are not the only places hiring engineers in the AI […] Read article

⏱ 5 min read AI agent infrastructure has become its own system design topic in 2026 interviews. The shift mirrors what happened with microservices Read article

⏱ 5 min read AI safety teams at the major labs operate with their own hiring rubrics, partly because the work is technically distinct Read article

⏱ 5 min read The AI lab behavioral round is structurally similar to a FAANG behavioral round — the candidate tells STAR-format stories about Read article

⏱ 6 min read Joining an AI lab from a FAANG company often means leaving a significant amount of unvested equity behind. The labs Read article

⏱ 5 min read Most major AI labs hire across two research tracks: research scientist and research engineer. Candidates often confuse the two — Read article

⏱ 5 min read The ML engineer interview in 2018 looked like a slightly modified software engineering interview: standard coding rounds plus one ML-specific Read article

⏱ 5 min read Mistral AI is the leading European AI lab and the most credible non-US frontier-model company in 2026. Based in Paris Read article

⏱ 5 min read AI lab compensation in 2026 is at the top end of the technology compensation market, but the underlying structure is Read article

⏱ 5 min read Google DeepMind operates a hiring process distinct from the rest of Google. The reason is structural: DeepMind hires across research, Read article

⏱ 5 min read The system design interview was one of the most stable interview formats for over a decade. The format — the Read article

⏱ 5 min read For about fifteen years, the standard coding interview was a LeetCode-medium problem on a whiteboard or shared editor. The format Read article

⏱ 4 min read The AI labs (Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepMind, Mistral, xAI, Cohere) and FAANG (Google, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft) compete for the same Read article

⏱ 6 min read The take-home assignment in 2026 sits in a gray zone. Most explicit instructions about AI tool use are either nonexistent Read article

⏱ 6 min read Anthropic is the company that, more than any other, formalized the AI-collaborative coding interview. The reason is structural: the company Read article