xAI did a great job to launch Grok, which is used in the X a lot to check facts. Now it’s an important player in the AI competition, especially it has the most powerful GPU resources.
xAI has many young engineers, around 200-500. I forgot the number that mentioned by the recruiter. I was contacted by a young manager from linkedin. Actually I was contacted by another guy from xAI. But after a 15 chat, I was rejected. This time, I was invited to have the onsite interviews.
First 15min Chat
The first 15min chat seems ramdom chat, about your experience, your thinking on AI, or whatever. You never know why you’re rejected or accepted. The first round I was asked some React basic knowledges. I didn’t use it for some time, but I still follow some big movement in React, such as the hooks. Anyway I was rejected by the first guy.
Onsite Interview
Two rounds, one is coding and one is design. The interviewers are very nice and young. The first coding question is not a leetcode problem, but a data structure problem. If you have some basic computer science knowledge, it’s not hard to hack it. I asked the work and life balance. The guy smiled and mentioned it was an Elon’s company, so everyone was buys and worked hard. Sometimes he worked in the weekend to accelerate the project development. They spent 1Q to launch the Grok website.
The system design was not hard, or the interview was not that expert, so the interview discussion was short, then another open question was asked. He spent much time to explain the open question clearly. I think it will save much time if he prepare some doc or screenshot to make the problem clearer.
One More Design Interview
This is a online design interview, but I didn’t notice the Google Meet link and thought it was another onsite interview. Fortunately the interviewer was in the office. So we met in person. He was a young person too. We had a great discussion in person. I drew something on the white board, though it was not beautiful, but he understood everything :)
I always like the in person design interview, because we can use the body language and draw on the white board, which is much easier than the online drawing tool.
Next Step
Waiting for the next step. If passing the previous one, it seems there is another presentation. Who knows what will happen. Nobody knows which come first, tomorrow or accident.