Blue Origin Senior Engineer interview questions

The interview itself was pretty straightforward. I had a one hour phone screen with the hiring authority and at the end asked if he had any reservations thst I could do the job and he said he did not. A followup more extensive interview at which I had to write and present a 1 hour pitch about myself. At the end I was told I’d hear something in a week. After almost four weeks of silence, I had to run them to get a “not interested.” Ignoring people who devoted several hours for preparation and the interview itself is just plain rude.

Interview process was a phone screen and an onsite interview that was mostly a group interview. The interview was great and I left with a very good impression of company wanting to accept the offer, provided it was competitive. But HR basically botched it and made a very poor offer that I ended up declining. My offer was for 130k with 30k signing bonus as a Senior Engineer. The base salary isn't too bad but for a private company that doesn't provide early bonuses or even any sort of equity, it isn't competitive. They seem to offer a 401k with 3% match and an industry standard 401k with 3% match. As for interview process, the session begins with a 1.5 hour group meeting with the team leads + CTO and some other folks who basically pepper your about your previous work. Nothing technical in this part, it's more a measure of how comfortable you're in group dynamics and how well you can explain the work that you've done. Then there's a 1 HR group lunch with the team that you'd be joining, which is nice. It let's you get a glimpse at the people you'd be working with directly. After the lunch the technical parts being. I was asked to write effectively a bit stream parser that had some start of a unique start code followed by a fixed size pay load. Your vanilla FSMs was the right answer. On the whole there are a lot of questions about building fault tolerant safety systems, which IMHO is usually weird to most people who really haven't worked in such a field. I just winged my way through it, and apparently did pretty well. All in all it looks like a really cool company to work at. CONS: - Honestly, the HR at the company...is less than ideal. If they had been more transparent with how much they'd be willing to pay me, I wouldn't have wasted my time and their money by going out to an onsite interview. My minimum was well beyond their maximum. - They follow up on your references. The kicker: one of the references must be your manager. WTF. Luckily I had a former manager (who barely remember my existence) I routed them to, but what kind of policy is this? I'm just posting this so people are aware (it might be a dealbreaker to some) and would be willing to drop out of the interview process for this, this sort of policy is ludicrous and shouldn't be encouraged.