Ab Initio employees are sharp, skillful, ambitious engineers with experience. It's clear what sort of personality would fit. The phone interview was by far the best part of the process. The interviewer was focused and asked relevant questions. There was a good balance between standard questions, specialized questions, and informal talk. Oddly, there was no opportunity to meet this interview in person. The one-on-one interviews were something of a heptathlon. Each individual interview fell into one of the familiar interview patterns: tell me about your experience; tell me how you would solve this logic problem; or explain to me how you would approach a real-world software problem. However, there was no concrete (or even partial) description of the position to be filled that could serve as a consistent set of talking points in each successive interview. There wasn't a beginning, middle, and end to the process; the day of interviews suddenly ended. Previously I had never sat for an interview that didn't have an agenda; this was among the longest interview processes, and among the least well organized. Individually--and without exception--the employees appear competent and driven, and they all have agreeable personalities. Each Ab Initio engineer may be experienced and perceptive enough to run the interview process alone. That may be one reason why, taking more than half a dozen interviews together, the interview process doesn't gel. (Or at least it doesn't gel for the candidate.) You may need to impose some sort of organization on the interview process yourself. Focus on your thesis or the most relevant major project. If you have multiple skills, it may be to your benefit to focus on just one skill and consider the others (temporarily) as just bonus skills.