Reverse interview questions

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About the position and the team

Why is the company hiring? (substitute, growth, …?)
- Why did the company decide to hire an outsider over promoting an internal employee?
Are you looking for a data scientist with software engineering skills or a software engineer with understanding of data and AI?
Growth prospects
- What’s the junior/senior balance of the team? How relatively senior will I be in the team and in the company?
- How can I develop in my new role / what opportunities are offered?
- Is there a separate tech and management career path?
- Are co-workers attend external conferences together? Which ones?
Which educational and professional backgrounds the team possesses?

Tell about the ASAP tasks for the coming month\quarter?
- Which technically engaging projects\tasks do you see ahead or set for the team?
- What does a typical day/week look like in this role?
Is there a research component to this position?
- Is there an exploration phase in every project?
- Is the high-level path to deliverable is always clear from the beginning?
How much time percentage-wise engineers spent for on-the-job learning? (reading papers, researching the best way to implement a solution)
During sprint planning, is the team successful in estimating tasks’ effort?
What is your definition of success for this role?
- Tell me about the behaviors of a person that you would consider a high-performing/high-potential employee.
- Why do you think some engineers perform better or worse than others?
- How is the performance review process set up? How is the progress tracked on team and individual level?

Who are the stakeholders? Do you enjoy working with them?
- Tell me about who I would be working most closely with.
How does the intra/inter-team communication typically work?
When there is a gap between expectations from management and performance of an engineer or team, what happens? (“this can’t be done in the projected time”)
How is the meetings culture?
- Is it easy to get ad-hoc help from someone from another team\department\manager?
- Are the cameras usually on or off during online meetings?
- What kind of meetings happen every week?
- What kind of social events does the team/company host and are these attended by everyone?
How many handshakes between me and stakeholders? CTO? Data Director?

What are the official and unofficial, but established ways of knowledge sharing?
- Do you have a developer documentation for your code? Do you have a separate documentation for customers?
- Are there internal meet-ups, conferences, hackathone events?
- Do you publish in journals, write whitepapers, open-source libraries?
Are you prepared for disaster recovery?
Would you be ashamed if your closed source codebase is published on the internet tomorrow?
Is AI being seen as money-maker or money-saver (or money spender)?
What is the plan to make or save more money by using cloud and data?

The JD mentions PySpark - how much is it really needed, how big is the datasets? Does work require tweaking the internals of Spark for best performance?
What is the process of getting the output of your work in the production and how long does it take?
- What is the entire process for a one line change in code to make it to production?
How much time and effort it takes to maintain existing models w.r.t. creating new value?
Do you have an ML system design document that you follow in every project? What are the must do points there?
Custom datasets
- Where does labeled data come from? How is (smart) labeling process?

How long do you manage people\teams\projects? Do you enjoy that? Do you have time for tinkering with code yourself?
What happens if the team misses a milestone? What are the consequences and actions of that?
- Does it happen or is this a hypothetical outcome?
- My best question is, “What would you say if you asked me to do something and I told you it’s not possible.”

How easy is it to get access to a dataset, compute resources, internal algorithms?
What do you think can be improved about internal processes? What was your WTF moment if any?
How strict is the IT policy? Are you able to get what you need in reasonable time? Does it limit you to the extent that the team needs to find workarounds?
What is the company policy regarding using AI assistants at work\for interviews? What is your personal view? What if I do this interview\home assignment with the help of GPT?
What is the hybrid\remote work policy?
- Does the company actively impose, control and micromanages for that?
- What is the ratio of remote to office workers?

What have you identified as your competitive advantage?
What are the big challenges you see coming up?
What is the company’s growth plan for the next 1 year? 5 years?
Where does the funding come from and who influences the high level plan/direction?
What are the bottlenecks for the company at the moment? How do you plan to solve them?

Is there anything else I can tell you about my skills and qualifications to let you know that I am a good fit for this job?
When can I expect to hear from you?

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