Databento job applicant FAQ

If you've applied for a role at Databento and have questions about your application or the process in general, you've come to the right place!

We've all been on the applicant side of the table, so we appreciate the time and effort that goes into submitting an application, and it's understandable that you're curious about the status of your application.

Since we're a small team, it can sometimes take us a bit longer to reply than what many applicants are used to when applying to larger corporations. That's because we take care to review every submission personally. We believe that having a human evaluate each resume is more effective and fair than relying on AI. While that may be significantly slower, it enables us to find the diamonds in the rough, or candidates with non-traditional backgrounds who might've been overlooked without the human touch.

We created this applicant FAQ to help answer your questions and give some additional context about our hiring process. We hope this helps guide you through the application process. We appreciate your interest in working at Databento and wish you the best of luck!

Read the article in full, or navigate to a relevant section via the highlighted FAQs below.

1.1 How do I know what positions are currently available?

1.2 I'd like to refer a candidate. How do I do so?

1.3 I'm a professional recruiter. How can I work with Databento?

1.4 I have questions about the role. Can I speak with someone on the team?

1.5 I'm a senior-level applicant. Can I speak with someone on the team?

1.6 Will I receive feedback on my application?

1.7 What do you look for in an application?

1.8 Why was my application rejected?

1.9 If there is no position that fits my background, will you create one for me?

1.10 What does your interview process look like?

1.11 What's the take-home assignment like?

1.12 How do you grade take-home assignments?

1.13 Do you prioritize experience or potential?

1.14 If I've been rejected in the past, may I reapply in the future?

1.15 What do you do with applicant data?

1.16 Note regarding phishing attempts and scams

All current open positions are listed at the bottom of our Careers page: https://databento.com/careers

Databento offers a $5,000 referral bonus per successful referral (introduced by you for the first time and hired as a full-time employee for a minimum of six months). To make a referral, please email their information to careers@databento.com.

Databento does not work with external recruiters at this time, whether on a contingency basis, retainer, or any other fee arrangement. Unsolicited outreach from recruiting agencies will not be considered.

Our policy is to only reach out to candidates after they've been selected for an interview. We receive thousands of applications in a given month, so this approach enables us to focus solely on the candidates we'd like to interview.

We don't give special treatment to anyone during the application process, regardless of seniority, salary, mutual friends, or network. This means that we won't take informational interviews or spend one-on-one time with prospective applicants until after they have been selected for a 1st round interview.

We will only contact applicants who have been selected to move forward in our process.

Please note that this also applies to applicants introduced (without our double opt-in) via mutual friends.

Due to the volume of applications and the size of our company, we cannot provide feedback to candidates until after they have advanced to the 1st round interview, regardless of role or seniority.

We evaluate every candidate individually, and requirements vary by role. That said, there are a few core criteria that are important to us as a small company:

• Quality over quantity: We believe that the quality of one's work is more important than the number of jobs or titles that one may have. How we evaluate quality depends on the role. For example, for internship positions, we look for a candidate's level of ownership in a given activity, rather than how many clubs they're a member of.
• Practice over theory: Nothing replaces experience. For example, we prioritize candidates who have built websites over those who have only read books on how to build one.
  • The only exception is for entry-level roles and internships, in which case we'll mention in the job description that no experience is required.
• Longevity over brevity: We prefer candidates who have experienced the impact of their legacy work over time. Our recruiting data also show that candidates with a history of frequent job changes are more likely to change jobs again and have less skin in the game (i.e., they usually don't stay for long). In our case, the time and cost of searching, hiring, and onboarding a new employee is very high: too high to justify the risk of hiring a frequent hopper.
  • We don't hire contractors, consultants, outsourced services, or part-timers.
  • We do hire full-time employees in various countries and allow employees to work from home, although some roles may require travel or physical work (e.g., a systems engineer may need to install servers at our data centers).
• Attention to detail: Given that every employee contributes to our public-facing product, we cannot afford to have typos and errors on our website, code, CRM, ATS, task manager, social content, etc. As a remote company, employees and users have fewer headaches when things are well-documented and organized.
  • For some roles, how you communicate in your resume matters, because it's an indicator of the quality of your work, writing, or code. For writing-intensive roles, typos and formatting mistakes may disqualify a candidate.
  • A note regarding resume formatting: We don't care whether you have a plain resume or a heavily-designed resume (the latter is high risk, high reward). But for some roles, we look for consistent formatting or signs that a candidate knows how to use technology and communicate well. Examples of consistent formatting include: consistent fonts, styles, tenses, colors, margins, alignment, and more. As a more specific example, we don't care whether the dates of your experiences are on the left or right side; however, inconsistent formatting means some dates are on the left and some on the right, with no pattern or indication of why.
• Communication: As a remote company, we look for a candidate's ability to communicate well despite the physical distance between us. For example, when you're late to an interview or need to cancel, it's better to communicate and let us know, rather than keep us worrying and wondering what happened. Another example is the ability to be concise. We've seen 20+ page resumes full of word salad and irrelevant keywords that could've been condensed into a few pages. We've also seen an increase in low-effort, AI-generated resumes lately.
  • We look for the ability to be honest and upfront about bad news. For example, we would rather you be honest about being fired rather than sugarcoating it.
  • We also look for the ability to use remote communication tools, such as Slack, email, phone, and Zoom.
  • A note on communication: There is a difference between good communication and English-speaking ability. You can be fluent in English but bad at communicating in a remote work setting, and vice versa. We've hired many people who learned English later in life.
• Management vs. Individual Contributor: Given our company's size, most of our job openings are for individual contributor roles. Thus, we prioritize candidates with experience doing IC work over candidates who spend most of their day managing others.
  • Big vs. small: On a related note, we sometimes prioritize candidates from companies of a similar size as us. For example, in sales-related roles, we look for candidates who have sold against the incumbent without relying on brand reputation. In marketing-related roles, we look for candidates who have worked with a small budget to promote an unknown brand.

The reason for rejection is likely related to our company's early stage, size, and an oversaturated job market:

• The criteria we're prioritizing might not align with your previous experiences.
• We may have filled the role or already have a full interview pipeline.
• Your background might be too similar to an existing teammate's background, and we might need more orthogonality on the team.
• Some criteria are subjective. For example, your definition of good visual design may differ from ours.
• There's a mismatch between your expectations for the role and what the role entails.
• We feel misaligned on salary, bonus, equity, and/or benefits expectations.
• You failed the take-home, or your take-home wasn't strong enough to justify your expected salary range.
• We might not be able to hire someone based in your location or country.

Databento only creates new roles in response to demand, not supply. If there's demand for the role, it will be posted proactively on our Careers page. This includes everything from full-time roles to advisory positions. As such, we do not respond to speculative or inbound inquiries.

However, on rare occasion — at the offer stage — we may change the job title (usually seniority level) to better match a candidate's responsibilities, experience, and/or career trajectory.

Please note that there is no secret job board: all open positions are listed on our Careers page.

Most interview processes consist of 3-4 rounds in total. Each round lasts, on average, between 30 and 60 minutes. Interviews are usually virtual and take place on Zoom or Google Meet. As we near the offer stage, we will reach out to 2 professional references (usually former managers). The total process takes 3-4 weeks on average.

There used to be a take-home assignment in lieu of a live technical round. However, in the era of AI, most of our open positions no longer have a take-home portion.

If there's a take-home: We recognize the importance of a skills-based test, but we want to respect your time and have therefore tried our best to implement something short yet sufficiently demanding to be evaluated fairly. The company will not use this assignment outside of the interview process, and only interviewers can view submissions.

We designed the take-home to last no more than an hour (similar to our behavioral interview). Please note that, as with our behavioral interviews, some candidates may take more or less than an hour to complete the take-home.

The specific grading criteria are listed at the bottom of each individual take-home. Below are some general criteria which apply to most positions:

• General writing skills: spelling, grammar, appropriate tone, and style.
• Organization: structure, design, and consistency in your work.
• Correctness: do your suggestions make sense?
• Ability to conduct research and acquire relevant domain knowledge within a limited timeframe.

It depends on the role.

• Entry-level roles are evaluated more on potential. We don't expect entry-level candidates to have working experience.
• Senior-level roles are evaluated more on experience. Have they earned their position over time, and have they realized their potential?

Yes, absolutely. Keep in mind that all companies use an ATS (applicant tracking system), and that our ATS may automatically flag a candidate as spam if they apply to too many jobs at once or too frequently.

We recommend reapplying 6-12 months down the road, or when a more relevant position opens up.

Databento does not sell applicant data or use applicant data for any commercial purposes. Application information is accessible only to HR and interviewers on an as-needed basis.

By submitting an application, you agree to abide by our privacy policy. Your data will be used only in the hiring process and will NOT be sold or misused. For legal reasons, we are usually required to retain a record of your application.

If you care deeply about privacy, then we recommend the following:

• Submit applications only on the company's website. Do not submit applications via third-party vendors like Indeed or Monster.
• Do not contact a company via their sales channels, as that automatically adds you to their CRM, which is separate from their ATS.
  • In Databento's case, please do not ask job-related questions via our help desk, support chat, or Slack community.
• Only put information that you're willing to share with the public on your resume.

Recently, there has been an uptick in scammers impersonating companies of all sizes. The scammer will send you an interview email and request that you purchase a company laptop, bitcoin, gift cards, or something else from a phishing link.

All official Databento emails come from databento.com. On occasion, an email might be sent from us.greenhouse-mail.io as Greenhouse.io is our ATS. Any other domains, e.g., databento.online, databento.io, databento.us, etc., are fake.

Databento is not responsible for a candidate's actions or consequences affiliated with scammers and phishers. Please exercise extreme caution.