I heard about the company through a recruiter. From the time the introduction was made, I had an initial phone screen with the hiring manager within a week. It took over 2 weeks for the hiring manager to get back in touch with the recruiter about next steps. After getting back to the recruiter they mentioned they would like to bring me in.
There offices are very dark and cluttered. There is not much space or privacy if you need it.
I was scheduled to meet with 8 people and the interview was supposed to last for 6+ hours. Most of the people I met with were friendly and passionate about The Echo Nest. Of the 6 people I actually ended up meeting with, 2 of them had be go through problem solving questions around how I would solve a problem with a given set of data. Overall I would say the interview was average level of difficulty, but expect to go in there prepared to think about music recommendations, discovery and some of the challenges you’d expect.
After the 6th interview, I was told I could leave. I was wondering why I never met with the last two people, but my guess is because they circled internally to come to the decision it was not worth moving forward.
I followed up 3 times after the interview, as did the recruiter, and the hiring manager did not acknowledge either of us. I find it extremely frustrating and obnoxious that someone would take an entire day out of their schedule to not even get a 2 line email or phone call delivering the news.
Overall, the company is doing really cool things with data and music, but they showed a real lack of tact and respect for their interviewees.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What is the best way to rank the most repeated songs with 3 dimensions in the data set:
user ID, timestamp, track.