I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at COMSOL in Mar 2012
Interview
I found the job posting on indeed.com and applied online at the company's website.
I got an email about two days later to schedule a phone interview with an applications engineer.
The phone interview went pretty ok. It was mostly technical stuff on computational fluid mechanics, turbulence modeling, finite element programing, open source software and my research work. I felt the interview went pretty ok and I was told to wait for their response in a couple of days.
About half and hour later, I got a call from the hiring manager inviting me for an onsite interview at Comsol office in Burlington MA.
The onsite interview lasted about 3 hours. I gave a presentation about my research. I got a number of technical questions during my presentation especially with regards to mathematical formulation of my research problem and the numerical implementation. I also got a lot of tech questions on fundamental numerics such as accuracy of Gudonov methods around a shock wave which to me was kinda odd considering how long ago I did all that stuff. At some point, I had to write out the steps for implementing the PISO algorithm on a white board...more like a thesis defense!
I had other 1:1 interviews with different applications engineers, the hiring manager and more senior personnel and it was basically tech stuff particularly relating to my research background.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How do you implement the pressure implicit splitting operation to decouple pressure from velocity when solving the incompressible Navier stokes equations?
First round was a screening round. In the second round, a set of questions were given and then I was asked to send the answers in 24 hours. My answers were discussed later in an interview.
I applied online. I interviewed at COMSOL (Los Angeles, CA) in Oct 2023
Interview
interview with hiring manager as well as director.
Never got back to me and when I followed up within the timeline they discussed didn't respond
received a typical hr email 3 weeks later
I applied online. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at COMSOL (Burlington, MA) in Dec 2022
Interview
First round video call interview Second round on-site research presentation and technical questions. Research presentation is about 20 minutes. Technical questions are mostly about the Galerkin FEM and numerical analysis in general. They did a great job of asking questions about my research too.
Applications Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at COMSOL with 2.8 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 67% positive. To compare, the company-average is 43.5% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Applications Engineer roles take an average of 38 days to get hired, when considering 9 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at COMSOL overall takes an average of 50 days.
Common stages of the interview process at COMSOL as a Applications Engineer according to 9 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 23%
Presentation: 19%
Group panel interview: 15%
Skills test: 15%
One on one interview: 15%
Background check: 12%
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