Recruitment

Using Recruiters

We are open to recruiters when hiring, and have had previous success with Maxwell Bond. They strike a negotiated rate fo 15% of the first year's salary. Where possible, recommendations from existing employees, or network-based referrals are encouraged as having positive first/second hand experience with potential employees is a stronger indicator of fit than a CV alone.

Hiring Process

This is a guide to the hiring process. It is not a strict process, and you can adapt it to the needs of the role and the candidate.

• Interview 1: Introduction
• Interview 2: Engineering Challenge
• Interview 3: CEO Interview

Interview 1: Introduction

The first interview is a general introduction to the company and the role. This is a chance for the candidate to get to know us, as much as it is for us to get to know them. Focus on the candidate's experience, skills, and fit for the role, a recommended format for the interview is as follows:

Introduction

Introduce yourself and explain the format of the interview. Emphasise that this is a chance for the candidate to get to know the company and the role, as much as it is for us to get to know them.

Elevator Pitch

Pass to the candidate and ask them to give a "2-minutes of you", stressing you have seen their CV and application, but want to hear about them in their own words. In particular, ask them for a summary of their career and experience to-date, but stress the importance of them explaining what they enjoy about their role and what they are seeking in their next opportunity.

Follow-On Questions

Ask the candidate about their career to-date, use their introduction as a natural springboard to ask follow up questions to extract more detail in the appropriate areas for the role you're hiring for.

Scripted Questions

Ensure you have a set of questions to ask the candidate, this should be based on the role you're hiring for, and the candidate's experience, though be more focussed on soft-skills and culture fit than technical questions.

Example questions you can ask include:

• "Please share details about the project or deliverable you are most proud of"
• "Tell us about a time you had to learn something new quickly to deliver on something important — what did you pick up, and how did you apply it?"
• "Describe a piece of work where you had real ownership from idea to delivery — what decisions did you make, and what would you do differently now?"
• "What part of your current or most recent role do you enjoy most, and what does a great week at work look like for you?"

Interview 2: Engineering Challenge

For technical hires, the second interview is a chance to assess the candidate's technical skills and fit for the role. In senior positions, we want to focus on their architecture and design skills, and their ability to solve complex problems. For junior positions, we want to focus on their technical knowledge and ability to learn quickly.

The structure of this interview will vary depending on the role, but a recommended format is to detail engineering challenges that are relevant to the role, and ask the candidate to collaborate with you to arrive at a sensible solution to the problem.

You can be intentionally vague in detailing the initial challenge. Encourage the candidate to ask questions to understand the problem and the context, and to propose a solution based on their understanding.

Assessment Criteria

• Technical Knowledge: The candidate should have a strong understanding of the technical concepts and principles relevant to the role.
• Problem Solving: The candidate should be able to think critically and solve problems effectively.
• Communication: The candidate should be able to communicate their thoughts and ideas clearly and effectively.
• Collaboration: The candidate should be able to collaborate with others to solve problems and deliver results.
• Adaptability: The candidate should be able to adapt to new information and adapt to changing conditions as they are presented.

Example Scenarios

Scenario 1: Product Comparisons

Given Product A, you are tasked with finding a set of comparable products on the market. You can explain that we have a database table of 28,000+ products from the cyber industry.

If the candidates struggles, then you can prompt them with additionial information, such as:

• "What information do you need to know about Product A to be able to find comparable products?"
• "What is the purpose of Product A? What is it used for?"

In particular, we use a technique to map the capablities of a product. Then, we do a query against the 28k+ products to check for overlapping capabilities. Additiona points that the candidate should flag here is caching, as we do not want to query the database for every single product comparison.

Depending on the role being hired for, we can look at this challenge with different lesnes too. For a Data Engineering hire, we want to focus on the models/algorithm used to run the comaprsion and any NLP techniques used to generate the information in the first place. For Software Engineer hires, we want to focus on the API design and implementation, query optimization and any additional features that the candidate would like to add to the solution.

Scenario 2: Findings & Signals

Explain how, in our product, we conduct interviews using AI agents to assert information about the products in a software portfolio. When an interview completes, the output is a transcript — a chronological record of messages sent by the agent and responses from the interviewee.

Once a transcript is available, we run it through a Findings engine. This extracts structured information from the conversation that may be important to us, such as:

• Risks
• Opportunities
• Integrations
• Sentiment analysis for a given prodict or vendor

Each interview may produce multiple findings. As new findings are collected, we run a Signals engine that looks for patterns across them:

• Are there multiple findings that support the same risk or theme?
• Are there findings that contradict or counter one another?

The candidate should be asked to design an approach for this pipeline — from transcript ingestion through to findings extraction and signal generation.

If the candidate struggles, you can prompt them with additional information, such as:

• "How would you structure a finding so it can be linked back to the source transcript?"
• "How would you ensure that the findings are accurate and reliable?"
• "How would you decide whether two findings belong to the same signal?"
• "What happens when a new finding strengthens, weakens, or contradicts an existing signal?"

A key part of this challenge is scale. Signals, once created, may need to be updated as new findings arrive. The candidate should address:

• How does a new or updated finding affect a signal that was generated from earlier findings?
• How do we discover new signals without re-scanning the entire findings corpus on every run — given that findings will only grow over time?

Depending on the role being hired for, we can look at this challenge with different lenses too. For a Data Engineering hire, focus on the models and pipelines used to extract findings from transcripts, embedding or clustering approaches for signal detection, and how to keep the corpus searchable at scale. For Software Engineer hires, focus on API design, event-driven processing when transcripts complete, data models for findings and signals, and strategies for incremental updates rather than full reprocessing.

Interview 3: CEO Interview

The third interview is a chance for the candidate to meet with the CEO. Here, depending on the role being hired, the CEO will dive into detail about the candidates experience and try to stress test them.

Recruitment Guides

Senior Data Engineer

For any hires in this role we have more comprehensive guides available which you can find here:

• Simple Guide
• Detailed Guide