It’s been said that a leader’s core job is two things. One, set direction and two, put the right people in the right roles. That’s why at Spice AI, the mission, hiring, and interviewing is fundamental and the people we bring into the team is critical for success. This post walks through our interviewing process as a guide for candidates and to share our learnings with the broader community.
Spice AI Hiring Principles
Everything we do at Spice AI is built from first-principles. Here are our hiring principles:
- High Standards — Every hire is exceptional and a bar raiser.
- Mission-Driven — Candidates are excited by and want to contribute to the Spice AI mission.
- Able — Hires are intelligent, are great communicators, and have done this before with a proven track record. As a startup, we need contributors who can hit the ground running and contribute from day 1. We’re also distributed, so communication is critical.
- Willing — Hires know the value of overcoming challenge, doing hard things, and are willing to put in the work to build something great together.
- Clarity of thought — Hires demonstrate clear thinking and problem solving, with written pieces to back it up, because “if you’re not writing, you’re not thinking.”
- Great judgement — Hires have a history of making great judgement calls and decisions.
- Vectors over scalars — Beyond table stakes, direction and velocity more important than a single measure of skill or ability.
- Hire people not just resumes — We’re on this mission and are building this company together.
A Unique Approach to Interviews
The Spice AI interview process includes a couple of unique elements. We generally minimize methods, like whiteboard interviews, which we believe to have limited value.
- Pair Programming: Pair programming sessions help assess collaboration, clarity of thought, and problem solving using real-world challenges. The first session is in your choice of Go or Rust, playing to your strengths, and the second in the other, demonstrating drive for results, adaptability, problem solving, and learning rate.
- Book and Paper Challenge: We introduce a novel way to get to know candidates and for them to get to know the team by discussing a research paper, white paper, or leadership book. Think of it like a mini book club. We ask the candidate to lead the discussion as if they were on the team already.
Example papers: MEMTO, Temporal Fusion Transformers, ToolLLM, Forecasting at Scale.
Example books: Mindset, The Big Leap, Extreme Ownership, Grit, The Dip, The Phoenix Project.
Standard Interview Process
Once a candidate proceeds to the engineering team, the standard interview process has two stages, either on the same or different days, and is as follows.
After the interview, the team will meet separately to discuss the candidate’s performance. Candidate profiles put forward as hires will then be presented in the weekly team meeting. A member of the team must advocate for the candidate for them to be given an offer.
Keys to Success at Spice AI
To succeed in becoming a part of the Spice AI team, candidates must demonstrate more than just technical proficiency. Being an A-player is table stakes. We look for individuals who are adaptable, thrive on challenge, and are deeply committed to the mission of making a better world through intelligent, AI-driven software.
Conclusion
At Spice AI, we believe A-players want to work with other A-players to create and contribute to something meaningful. We strive to build a team of exceptional individuals aligned to the Spice AI vision and mission. Hiring is principled and uniquely designed to ensure the right people are in the right roles. The interview process is thorough and challenging, but know that if you succeed, you will join and be working with others who have also overcome it and want to build side-by-side with you.
If that resonates with you, check out our open roles at spice.ai/careers, and apply today!
About Spice AI
Founded in June 2021 by Microsoft and GitHub alumni Luke Kim and Phillip LeBlanc, Spice AI creates technology to help developers build intelligent apps that learn and adapt.
Before co-founding Spice AI, Luke was the co-creator of Azure Incubations in the Office of the Azure CTO, where he led cross-functional engineering teams to create and develop technologies like Dapr, OAM, and Radius.
Spice AI is backed by some of the top industry angel investors and leaders, including Nat Friedman, Chairman of GitHub, Mark Russinovich, CTO of Microsoft Azure, and Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub who is also on Spice AI’s board.
Spice AI also has notable VC backing from Madrona Venture Group, Basis Set Ventures, Founders’ Co-op, and Picus Capital.
Learn More
Interested in working with Spice AI or looking to learn a little more about the work we do? We are always looking for our next big challenge. Book an introductory call via our Calendly. Take a deeper look at our enterprise offerings by visiting Spice.ai.
