I interviewed at Balyasny Asset Management (London, England)
Interview
Pretty standard , 3-5 interviews that range from technical ability to culture fit. Meeting with global team members and cross team leaders. Very smooth process and very responsive interviewers. Well organised company.
I applied through a staffing agency. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Balyasny Asset Management (New York, NY) in Jan 2023
Interview
The interview is divided into 3 rounds Round 1: Interview with HR, they will go through your resume and try to see if you are fit for the respective role or not. After this round manager may take 1 week to invite you for an interview if they like your profile. Round 2: Hackerrank coding with the Team Lead. puzzles on SQL, C#, and LINQ queries. Not too difficult. this is 1 hr round. Round 3: 2.5 hrs round and this round is divided into 3 software engineers who take interviews one by one. Round 3.1 is on System Design and React Basic Questions. Round 3.2 Deep dive on C# like difference b/w struct and class, how they consume memory. Object pooling, async programming, and multithreading. Round 3.2 is about your behavior, problem-solving skill, and communication skills.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. system Design on Random problem. 2. React router uses 3. what is hooks 4. What is React fragment <> 5. Basic C# question. They ask basic questions on each and every aspect of C# like classes interface, memory consumption, threads, and garbage collection.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Balyasny Asset Management (New York, NY) in Nov 2022
Interview
I was given an access to a virtual machine that had a simplified copy of Balyasny work environment with various things broken. I was asked to fix things and add some implementations. This is a good approach in theory, but there were a few things that made it terrible. - There were simply too many things to do for 45 minutes - The tasks were linear. E.g. you could not move on to programming until you fix the Docker container, since their software does not run without docker. The container was broken in a non-trivial way, e.g. the main project run was part of the build step. It is hard to figure that out unless you know what the project is supposed to do. - You could Google things, but they insisted you do inside the virtual machine, which made scrolling PAINFULLY slow. I don't think it was intentional, but it slowed down things quite a bit So, the problem with the interview was not that it was difficult per se, but that it was trying to test too many things at once over a very short period of time, without even theoretical possibility to finish them all.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Fix a broken Docker container. It did not get enough stuff copied, and it included main program executed during the build step instead of entry point. This is not trivial in its own right, since to know that this is wrong, you need to be faimilar with the project setup.
There were 15 or 17 failing unit tests that I was required to fix. However, when I randomly picked one, the interviewer advised me not to go there, since fixing that test is not trivial at all, and suggested an easier one.
Implement two functional endpoints using their Web framework (they guide you through some details, but still it's not something one was expected to be familiar with out of the box, and it was not a position requirement)
