Interview Prep: Sell Me This Pen

29 Nov, 2025

• Jenya's AI Interview Prep Notes
  • Sell Me This Pen
  • The Coding Grind
  • The ML Grind
  • Classic System Design
  • Just Chatting
  • Keep At It

Build a Funnel and Keep It Full

You want a constant stream of opportunities coming in, and it takes time:

• Reach out broadly, message everyone you know, and ask people to connect you with "someone who knows someone" for referrals.
• Don’t wait to talk to recruiters, schedule intro calls as early as possible. You can always push actual screening interviews 3-4 weeks out, but you can’t retroactively start the process earlier.

Do now: Get LinkedIn Premium¹ for a couple of months. Check who’s viewing your profile, which searches you appear in, and how your impressions trend. Use your favorite chatbot to improve your headline and summary, make small changes, and do light A/B testing to see what increases views and recruiter hits.

Recruiters will often push for a call, pitching a "rocket ship company" with hundreds of millions in funding and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Always ask upfront for the name of the company and the specific role they think is a good fit for you. Many of these roles won’t align with your goals, it’s perfectly fine to say no early, instead of spending hours triaging it over live calls.

Treat Intro Calls as Sales Calls

Every call is a chance to pitch yourself. You need a crisp, repeatable narrative (use chatbots to refine), and you should adjust it to who you’re speaking with.

1. Recruiter Edition

Goal: help them route you correctly and keep the process alive, some of the conversation died down because I didn’t get to talk to the right people.

• High-level role description, how you describe what you do in one or two sentences.
• Focus areas, e.g., pre-training, post-training, infra, hardware, storage, reliability, etc.
• Level + target role, what seniority level you expect and what kind of role you’re looking for.

This stage can easily derail your process if you’re misrouted. Be explicit:

• Ask them to route you to teams that match your background.
• Ask to speak with the hiring manager.
• For smaller companies, it’s reasonable to ask to speak with the VP, CTO, or equivalent.

2. Hiring Manager Edition

Goal: examples of tech work and leadership

• What you built and why it mattered
  • Frame it in terms of business/impact (e.g., "managed systems handling billions of dollars of capacity", not "I did things to GPUs all day").
• Leadership stories
  • What you led: projects, teams, initiatives, cross-org efforts.
  • Almost everyone has some leadership angle, pull out concrete examples.

3. Technical Edition

Goal: tech depth.

• Know your numbers
  • You don’t need to share confidential details, but you should know and use public or reasonable approximations (scale, order of magnitude, performance, costs, etc.).
• Hard problems you’ve solved
  • Prepare a few gnarly debugging/performance/reliability/infra stories.
  • Be ready to go very deep depending on the interviewer: what was broken, how you noticed, how you debugged, what metrics/telemetry you used, what trade-offs you made, and what changed after the fix.

Many challenges big-tech faces aren’t technical, they’re cultural or organizational. Avoid those topics unless you’re interviewing for a pure leadership role at another big tech company. Instead, focus on the technical difficulty that comes from scale, and craft stories that highlight why the problems were hard from an engineering perspective.

Not every call will go well. That’s normal. Treat it as a loop: chat, observe what landed, refine, repeat.