I was contacted by the recruiter for the position of Senior AI Engineer at Target. I had a 30 min chat with the recruiter regarding my prior work experience and my interests. This was followed by a technical phone screen of 45 min. One of the senior engineers called me and gave coding questions on code interview platform. I was selected for final interviews which was done after a week. It was done on zoom, 4 rounds with 15 min gap after each round. 1st round was with a lead AI engineer. He asked me questions on code interview as well. Started with a simple ML problem followed by SQL and coding question (first non repeating character in a string) 2nd round was with principal AI engineer of the team. He asked me questions regarding my work experience and projects. Asked conceptual questions about REST apis. 3rd round was with director of the team. She was very cheerful and asked me behavioral questions mostly. I enjoyed talking to her! 4th round was again with lead AI engineer. She asked me about my projects and some SQL questions on Code interview as well. Overall, the interview process was great and I got to talk to 5 out of 9 members in team at Target. October 9th - Got a reject saying they are going ahead with another candidate.

I only got to the point of meeting with the recruiter. The recruiter did not have a good understanding of technology. They basically went through a checklist asking about years of experience with different technologies. They were pure quantitative questions and the recruiter was not able to assess the quality of experience. For example, if they were looking for 2 years of experience with Python but you had 1 year working 80 hour weeks leading a Python project it felt like all they wrote down was "1 year". They were even asking silly things like how many years of experience do you have with Git. This doesn't seem like an appropriate question for a senior engineering role. I think most of the information could have been discovered by reading my resume. As a result, it was a waste of both of our times.