Candidate Guide
Interview
Process
This is your prep guide for your interviews with Proxima. Our department leaders and recruiters put together this guide so you know what to expect and how to prepare. This document covers all of the steps in the typical interview process however your particular interview process may be altered and customized depending on your particular areas of expertise, the role you're interviewing for and the business needs. In summary, this guide is designed to answer most of the questions you may have about the interview process, and how to set yourself up for success by preparing. If you have further questions be sure to reach out to recruiting and they'd be happy to answer them for you.
Good Luck!
Despite the name, the Intro Call is a formal interview. The interviewer will ask you to speak about your academic and industry experience as well as ask questions to assess your hard skill sets, both generally and as they relate to the specific role and team that you're interviewing for. Be sure to read and understand the job description carefully.
The Intro Call will also assess soft skill sets and personality traits that we look for here at Proxima. They will want to understand your underlying motivations, ie why are you interested in working here at Proxima.
We operate in a flat, fast paced, highly unstructured environment so the interviewer will be looking for the following signals that correlate to success in this type of setting:
Ambiguity, Adaptability & Self-Sufficiency
How do you operate in an ambiguous and quickly changing environment? Can you make independent decisions and sustain productivity when missing information? How did you react when you had to pivot away from a project due to a shift in priority?
Problem Solving
We're evaluating how you comprehend and explain complex ideas and think creatively when solving problems. Are you providing the reasoning behind a particular solution? Developing and comparing multiple solutions? Speaking about space and time complexity? Optimizing your solution? Be prepared to talk walk through complex problem you faced and solved.
Collaboration & Communication
How well do you communicate with your teammates, managers, cross functional partners and clients? How do you partner with people and work cross functionally? What are some successful collaborations you've had?
Growth, Challenges, Conflict
Discuss a challenging project that you led that succeeded or that failed. Why did it succeed/fail and what did you learn? Do you take constructive criticism as an opportunity to improve? Examples of how you're growing as a professional.
At the end of the interview the candidate will have some time to ask questions about Proxima, the role and what it's like to work here. Be prepared to answer the question of why you're interested in Proxima and how you see yourself contributing here.
The Panel Interviews are a continuation of the assessment that we begin in the Intro Call. Typically we conduct 2-4 Panel Interviews, each with a separate individual from the business group that you are being considered for, as well as individuals from cross functional partner teams.
The assessment process will be similar to that of the Intro Call with the expectation that we will dive much deeper into your domain expertise. The Panel Interview will be further customized to your professional and academic background as well as your target role and department, ie Strategy & Ops, Computational Chemistry, Computational Biology, AI Science, Software Engineering etc. You will not be asked to conduct any coding, whiteboarding or provide any visauals during these interviews however if this is a preference of yours when answering more technical questions then you are free to introduce a whiteboard or other form of visual.
Regardless of what team and role you're interviewing for, keep in mind we'll be assessing how you'd fit into our ecosystem as a whole. Many of our scientists contribute to our code base and AI/ML models, and many of our AI Scientists and Software Engineers contribute to our biological and chemistry insights and pipelines. To call us a collaborative work environment is an understatement.
See Additional Resources for sample questions →
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Technical / Thought
Exercise &
Presentation
03
If the Intro Call & Panel Interviews go well, you will progress to our final round. Depending on the role this will either be a Technical or Thought Exercise along with a Presentation. We will send you an exercise that you will have 5-7 days to complete - duration is exercise dependent- and deliver your results. After delivery we will schedule a 1 hr Presentation, 30 minutes to present your work, 30 minutes for a Q&A with the interview panel. See below for some insight on what the exercise is designed to evaluate.
The Proxima technical exercise is designed to evaluate your ability to:
- Leverage your scientific and project management skills
- Interpret an ambiguous multi-step scientific problem, break it down into its core modules
- Create a reproducible project “plan of attack”
- Identify pros/cons with your approach and plan “next-steps” to address them
- Decide where to innovate and where to leverage the existing solutions
- Communicate your work both to team members and clients
Keep in mind that this exercise is intentionally ambiguous — part of what we are evaluating is your ability to achieve a reasonable “week 1,” answer given incomplete information and insufficient time.
We recognize that these exercises can seem like a heavy lift and at times- depending on the specific problem, your work schedule etc- not possible to do properly in the time we have allotted you, which is by design. It's not about the hours you spend, it's about convincing us that you can thrive here and will make the team better. Every person at Proxima has gone through an exercise exactly like this and been voted to receive an offer from the Proxima team. This process is why, in our view, we have one of the top tech-bio teams in the world. The exercise is a platform for you to show us you belong here, how you do that is up to you – again there is no length or hours threshold.
Intro Call & Panel Interview: Questions we may ask
Role agnostic, generalized questions:
- 01Can you identify personal experiences or skills that you believe would uniquely contribute to novel areas like targeted protein degradation?
- 02Do you have any small-molecule project experience?
- 03What's your contribution in developing tools that were used in your projects?
- 04Have you worked on open source projects, either your own or within the community, as an external contributor or a core developer?
- 05Have you done any method development work or do you primarily leverage existing solutions?
- 06What do you prefer working on? Would you be more interested in client-facing projects or internal R&D?
- 07Tell me about your journey from XYZ into computational biology or chemistry/software/machine learning?
- 08What do you like about your current job? What do you dislike?
- 09Why are you looking for a new job and what are you looking for in a new job?
- 10If you had all the resources in the world, what would you work on?
- 11In your opinion, what are the most exciting AI technologies in our problem space?
- 12What aspect of innovative drug discovery approaches, like induced proximity, do you find most intriguing or promising?
- 13What do you think will be the next major innovation within the induced proximity space?
Role & Team specific questions:
- 01What experience do you have collaborating with a big pharma partner?
- 02How did you solve outliners in your QSAR model?
- 03How do you measure the uncertainty of your ML models?
- 04What were some of the most difficult problems you faced when deciding how to design the initial XYZ architecture / concepts?
- 05What's your familiarity with: distributed computing/GKE, deployment stacks, CI/CD, workflow automation, Scientific Computing, data and compute infra?
- 06How about cheminformatics, do you have experience with rdkit?
- 07What experience in bioinformatics do you have, any experience working with structural data?
- 08What areas of molecular modeling and scientific computing would you say you're a domain expert in?
- 09Can you tell me about how you would approach visualizing chemical similarity for 1B molecules?
- 10Sometimes projects don't go according to the research plan in the contract. The partner wants to gain more confidence and do more work than we anticipated. But it would end up affecting the timeline and budget. What would you do as a Project Lead in this situation?
Soft Skills Questions:
- 01Can you share an example of a complex problem you faced in your previous role and how you went about solving it?
- 02Describe a situation where you had to make a decision under time constraints. How did you approach it, and what was the outcome?
- 03What do you do when projects fall behind schedule? Do you have an escalation framework?
- 04Tell us about a time when you had to quickly learn a new skill or adapt to a new work environment. What was your approach, and what did you learn from the experience?
- 05How do you stay updated on industry trends and incorporate new knowledge into your work?
- 06Provide an example of a successful collaboration experience. What role did you play, and how did it contribute to the team's success?
- 07Describe a situation where you had a disagreement with a team member. How did you handle it, and what was the resolution?
- 08Share an experience where you took the initiative to lead a project or drive a significant change. What were the challenges, and how did you overcome them?
- 09How do you motivate and inspire your team to achieve common goals?
