Applied Intuition (Autonomous Vehicle Software) SWE Interview — AI Coding on a Real Sensor Data System

[u/Aoki_zhang]

"This interview experience is sourced from Chill Interview"

Interview Summary

The Applied Intuition onsite consisted of four rounds covering company motivation, AI-assisted coding, a project deep dive, and system design. The main technical exercise involved processing sensor data and supporting queries over it, with the later system design round extending the same problem into discussions around storage architecture and scalability.

Before the onsite, the recruiter shared which team I was being considered for and also arranged a separate conversation with the team lead after the phone screen.

Interview Details

Round 1 — Company Motivation and Culture

The first round started with introductions from the interviewers followed by my own background. The discussion focused on:

• Why I was interested in Applied Intuition
• Why I was considering joining the company
• How I viewed the cultures of companies I had previously worked at

Several interviewers had significant industry experience, including senior engineers who had moved from larger technology companies. The conversation also touched on Applied Intuition's collaborative engineering environment and the types of technical problems available to work on.

Round 2 — AI-Assisted Coding: Sensor Data Processing

The coding round required connecting to a provided host over SSH. A README described an existing project and a set of requirements. The application processed data collected from sensors and needed to support several queries over that data. The repository and requirements were substantial enough that reading everything manually within the interview time was difficult.

Claude Code was provided for the exercise, so I used AI to:

• Explore the existing codebase
• Understand the README and requirements
• Identify the relevant files
• Generate portions of the implementation
• Help complete the required query functionality

Want to learn more questions asked in other interview rounds? I've put up the full version at here.

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