G42 careers and interviews, and the wait after the offer.
Updated · Sources at the end
Software engineers at G42 report three rounds (HR, the hiring manager, and one technical round with an algorithm task and a system design task) at a difficulty Glassdoor users rate below three out of five. The part candidates complain about comes after the offer. Several candidates on Glassdoor, seen in search snippets, describe being asked for their passport and certificates after accepting, then waiting two to four weeks for verification or what they understood to be a security clearance, and in some cases having the offer withdrawn with no explanation. One describes three months of interviews followed by more than six weeks of internal approvals with no decision. This guide covers the rounds, and then how to protect yourself during that last stage.
G42 was founded in Abu Dhabi in 2018 and is a holding company for AI businesses. Inception42 (called Inception until a rebrand in July 2026) builds agentic AI for governments and large companies and released the Arabic language model Jais with MBZUAI and Cerebras in August 2023. Khazna runs data centres, Core42 runs cloud and digital services, CPX works in cybersecurity, and Presight, Space42, M42 and AIQ are also in the group. Microsoft invested $1.5 billion for a minority stake in April 2024, under an agreement written with the UAE and US governments, and in May 2025 G42 announced Stargate UAE, a large AI computing campus in Abu Dhabi, with OpenAI, Oracle, NVIDIA, SoftBank and Cisco.
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The questions for your exact G42 role and level.
Interviewing at G42? Below are the questions candidates report. For the ones your exact role and level will get, paste the posting. Your first mock is free.
Who G42 hires
On 16 October 2026 G42's own careers portal listed 52 jobs, 44 of them in the UAE (Abu Dhabi city and MBZ City) and 7 in the United States. Inception42 had the most: a principal software engineer for its AI platform, a data engineer building AI agents and RAG pipelines on Azure, an ML QA engineer testing AI applications for finance, and solution engineering and product leaders. CPX was hiring security engineers, incident responders and SOC leads. The Inception42 ads ask for Python, SQL and PySpark for data roles, React or Angular with Node.js, Python or Go for platform roles, and hands-on work with LLM applications, agents, RAG and vector databases across both. Some group companies, such as Core42, also hire through portals of their own under the same careers site.
Wondering whether your resume reads like someone G42 hires? Get a free resume review.
What is the G42 interview process?
G42 does not publish its interview process. The shape below comes from candidate reports on Glassdoor, seen in search snippets, which put the average at about three weeks from first contact to offer across 37 reports. That figure stops at the offer; the checks after it are on top. Background checks appear in about one report in five, and a few mention a personality test, without naming the tool.
Your background, why G42, your notice period and, if you live outside the UAE, how and when you would move. Expect a question on salary expectations here.
Your recent projects in depth and how you work with stakeholders. For senior engineers, reported topics include Java, Spring and how you maintain software over time.
An algorithm task and a system design task. One candidate was asked to merge k sorted lists and was allowed to code a simpler version and then describe the optimal one, so talking through the better approach counts.
Software engineeringReported as the screening step for data scientists, before the HR interview. It is followed by an interview with a data science lead on your projects, ML research questions and basic coding.
Data scienceResearch assistants report an HR screen, then a technical interview with the lead scientist about their past research, then a coding round about a week later.
ResearchReported topics include system design, behavioural and leadership scenarios, product management, ML fundamentals, agentic AI architecture and RAG.
Director and senior manager rolesCandidates report an indicative offer, then a request for their passport and education certificates, then a wait for verification and internal clearance. Some offers were withdrawn at this point without a reason. The section below covers how to handle it.
After the G42 offer: verification and clearance
What candidates report and how to protect yourselfSeveral candidates on Glassdoor, seen in search snippets, describe the same sequence after the interviews: an indicative offer, a request for a passport and education certificates, then two to four weeks of verification or internal clearance. Some say the offer was then withdrawn with no reason given, and one describes more than six weeks of approvals after three months of interviews. G42 has not said what the checks involve. It works under a security and compliance agreement with Microsoft that was written with the UAE and US governments, and candidates link the wait to security checks, but no report explains why a particular offer was withdrawn. You cannot control the outcome, so the advice here is about not losing anything while you wait.
- Do not resign until the offer is final: An indicative offer can still be withdrawn. Keep your current job, and do not give notice, sign a lease or book a move, until you have the final signed offer and know the visa process has started.
- Have your documents ready on day one: Candidates are asked for their passport and education certificates. Ask the recruiter early which documents they need and whether your certificates must be attested, and start on that straight away if so.
- Ask for the steps and the timeline in writing: Ask what the offer depends on (references, document checks, clearance), roughly how long each takes, and who you can contact while you wait. A written timeline lets you plan your notice and gives you a reason to follow up.
- Keep your other interviews going: A withdrawn offer costs least when you still have other options. Tell other employers you have an offer pending checks, and keep going until G42's offer is final.
- Follow up once a week: A short, polite email each week asking for an update is reasonable. Candidates describe long silences rather than refusals, so a follow-up is often the only way to learn where things stand.
- If it is withdrawn, ask once and move on: Candidates report getting no reason. Ask whether you can be considered for other roles in the group later, then put the time into your other options.
These come from candidate reports. G42 publishes no policy on this, and some candidates describe a smooth process that ends in an offer about a month after the first call. Ask your recruiter directly what happens after the offer and how long it usually takes for your role.
The rest of the loop depends on your role. Pick it, or paste the posting, and Calibrd predicts the rounds and questions you are likely to get at G42.
Predict my G42 questions →What G42 screens for
G42's careers page and the Inception42 job ads describe the people they want in the same few words, and the manager round is where they come up.
- Bias for action: the Inception42 ads name it as the heart of the culture
- Comfort with ambiguity, described in the ads as the agility to adapt to it
- Customer focus, both in the ads and on the careers page, which lists customer centricity among the things G42 values
- Working well with stakeholders across engineering, product, security and compliance, which the ML QA ad spells out
- Curiosity, in the ads' words an inquisitive mind
- Hands-on experience shipping AI into real products, which almost every current engineering ad asks for
G42 interview questions
Candidate-reported themesCandidates report only a few G42 questions by name, so the technical themes mix the reported ones with practice questions in the style of the current job ads, and each says which it is. The behavioural questions follow what G42's own ads say they look for.
Behavioural & motivation
- Why G42, and why move to Abu Dhabi?Listening for: Specificity · Connection · Research
- Tell me about a time you had to move forward on a project before the requirements were clear.Listening for: What was unclear · How they moved · Result
- Tell me about a time you worked with security, compliance or legal teams to get something shipped.Listening for: The constraint · How they worked it · Outcome
- Tell me about an AI feature you built that behaved differently in production than in testing.Listening for: The gap · The fix · Measured
- What are your salary expectations?Listening for: Preparation · Anchor · Composure
Technical
- Merge k sorted linked lists into one sorted list. Start with a simple approach, then explain how you would make it faster.Algorithms: Reported in the software engineering technical round: merge k sorted lists, where the interviewer accepted a simpler solution followed by a description of the optimal oneListening for: Working first · Better approach · Edge cases
- Practice: design a platform that lets several government departments build AI assistants on their own documents, with each department's data kept separate.System design: Reported as the second half of the technical round, without a named prompt. A practice question in the style of Inception42's platform adsListening for: Data kept apart · The pipeline · Running it
- Practice: an AI agent can read a user's records and also take actions such as submitting a request. How do you stop it from doing something the user did not ask for?Agents and RAG: Reported for leadership roles (agentic AI architecture and RAG), and asked for in the current platform and data engineering ads. A practice questionListening for: Permissions · Confirmation · Prompt injection
- Practice: you load daily files from several departments into a lakehouse that feeds an AI assistant. How do you make sure bad data does not reach it?Data pipelines: From the Inception42 data engineer ad (Python, SQL, PySpark, Databricks, ETL and data quality). A practice questionListening for: Checks · Safe reruns · Visibility
- Outline an approach to detect when a person falls, from video or from a wearable sensor.Applied ML for data scientists: Reported in a 2023 data science interview: outline an algorithm that detects when a person fallsListening for: Framing · Model and data · Errors that matter
These are the reported themes, and your loop is role-specific. Paste the actual posting and Calibrd predicts the questions for that exact role and level. How the questions are predicted →
Predict my G42 questions →Pay
G42's job ads publish no pay, and we found no reliable, dated salary figures for its engineers, so this guide gives none. Salaries in the UAE carry no personal income tax, so compare offers on take-home pay, and ask the recruiter for the full package on the first call. The Dubai and UAE market guide covers how pay and visas work there. Calibrd benchmarks the pay on any posting you scan against its level and location.
How to prepare for a G42 interview
- Read the ad for which G42 company is hiring (Inception42, CPX, Core42 and others), and learn what that company sells before the HR call.
- Have your notice period, move timeline and salary expectations ready for the first call.
- Prepare two projects you can explain in depth for the manager round, including how you kept them maintainable.
- Practise medium algorithm problems out loud, getting a working version first and then describing the faster one, as the reported technical round allows.
- Practise one system design for an AI platform with retrieval, separate tenants and access control.
- For AI and data roles, be ready to talk about agents, RAG and evaluation from your own work, since nearly every current ad asks for it.
- Data scientists: expect a take-home on coding and ML research first, and leave time to present it clearly.
- Ask what happens after the offer and how long it usually takes, before you accept.
- Gather your passport and education certificates early, and check whether the certificates need attestation.
- Keep your current job and other interviews going until the offer is final.
This guide covers G42's hiring for software, data, AI and research roles, mostly at Inception42 and the group's other Abu Dhabi companies. For management and leadership roles the loop is similar but the bar shifts to people, delivery and strategy, so pair it with the leadership interview prep hub. The bar for your exact role comes from the role-by-role guides, and the prep that actually transfers is spoken, so run a mock interview before the real one.
Also interviewing at Scale AI, Perplexity or Glean? Their guides follow the same format, from the first screen to the offer.
Knowing the questions isn’t the same as answering them out loud. Run a G42 mock: spoken answers, coached on the spot. Your first mock is free.
Run a G42 mock →FAQ & sources
What is G42's interview process?
G42 does not publish its interview process. The stages, in order: HR or phone screen; Hiring manager round; Technical round; Data science assignment; Lead scientist and coding interviews; Leadership loop; Offer, documents and clearance.
What does G42 look for in candidates?
G42's careers page and the Inception42 job ads describe the people they want in the same few words, and the manager round is where they come up. Bias for action; Comfort with ambiguity, described in the ads as the agility to adapt to it; Customer focus, both in the ads and on the careers page, which lists customer centricity among the things G42 values; Working well with stakeholders across engineering, product, security and compliance, which the ML QA ad spells out.
What questions does G42 ask in interviews?
Candidates report only a few G42 questions by name, so the technical themes mix the reported ones with practice questions in the style of the current job ads, and each says which it is. Technical themes: Algorithms; System design; Agents and RAG; Data pipelines; Applied ML for data scientists.
What happens after you accept a G42 offer?
Several candidates on Glassdoor, seen in search snippets, describe the same sequence after the interviews: an indicative offer, a request for a passport and education certificates, then two to four weeks of verification or internal clearance. Some say the offer was then withdrawn with no reason given, and one describes more than six weeks of approvals after three months of interviews. Covered on this page: Do not resign until the offer is final; Have your documents ready on day one; Ask for the steps and the timeline in writing; Keep your other interviews going; Follow up once a week; If it is withdrawn, ask once and move on.
How do I prepare for a G42 interview?
Read the ad for which G42 company is hiring (Inception42, CPX, Core42 and others), and learn what that company sells before the HR call. Have your notice period, move timeline and salary expectations ready for the first call.
- 01G42, Careersthe careers portal, the hybrid workplace policy, and productivity, customer centricity and work-life balance as what G42 values (read 16 October 2026)
- 02G42 careers portal, job search52 listings: 44 in the UAE and 7 in the United States; 25 at Inception42, 18 at CPX, 8 at G42 Americas and 1 at AIQ (read 16 October 2026)
- 03Inception42, Principal Software Engineer, Abu Dhabi12 to 15+ years, React or Angular, Node.js, Python or Go, distributed systems, AI agents, RAG and guardrails, and the What We Look For section (posted 22 September 2026)
- 04Inception42, Data Engineer, Abu DhabiPython, SQL, PySpark, Azure Databricks, AI agents, RAG and data quality (posted 4 September 2026)
- 05Inception42, Engineer - ML QA, Abu Dhabitesting AI applications for finance, including agent actions, confirmation steps, prompt injection and work with security and compliance teams (posted 16 October 2026)
- 06Campaign Middle East, G42's Inception rebrands to Inception42the rebrand and the move from research institute to agentic AI for governments and large organisations (2 July 2026)
- 07Cerebras, Jais open-sourced by G42's Inceptionthe Arabic language model built by Inception with MBZUAI and Cerebras (30 August 2023)
- 08Microsoft, Microsoft and G42 partner to accelerate AI innovation in UAE and beyondthe $1.5 billion investment, the move to Azure, and the Intergovernmental Assurance Agreement developed with the UAE and US governments (15 April 2024)
- 09Wikipedia, G42 (company)founded in Abu Dhabi in 2018, the group companies, about 25,000 employees in 2024, and the Stargate UAE announcement of 22 May 2025
- 10Glassdoor, G42 Software Engineer interviewsHR, manager and technical rounds, an algorithm task and a system design task, an offer about a month in; seen in search snippets
- 11Glassdoor, G42 Software Developer interviewsthe two-part technical round and the merge k sorted lists problem with the optimal solution described afterwards; seen in search snippets
- 12Glassdoor, G42 Senior Software Engineer interviewsJava, Spring, algorithms and software maintenance; seen in search snippets
- 13Glassdoor, G42 Data Scientist interviewsthe data science assignment, the HR and data science lead interviews, and the fall detection question (2023); seen in search snippets
- 14Glassdoor, G42 interviewsabout 21 days on average across 37 reports, the stage mix including background checks and personality tests, research and leadership loops, offers withdrawn after document checks or clearance, and long approval waits; seen in search snippets
Interview processes change. This reflects widely-reported and sourced conditions as of 2026 — confirm specifics with your recruiter, and treat it as a map rather than a guarantee.
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