Posting this to share my experience and maybe get some perspective from the community.

Background

• Role initially: QA Intern
• Later changed (via email): Associate Machine Learning Engineer Intern
• OA conducted via college
• 6 candidates shortlisted, 2 reached final rounds

Round 1 – Technical Screening

• Format:

  • Quiz-style questions (similar to Google-style logical rounds)
  • Company-related questions
  • DSA:
    • Anagrams
    • Find the Duplicate Number (LC 287)

• I Explained brute → optimized approachesm ,Implemented optimal solution,Answered follow-ups ,discussed ML/LLM projects (ML vs GenAI, transformers, etc.)

• Result: Only 2/6 candidates shortlisted

• I cleared this round

Round 2 – HR / Process (Unexpected Direction)

This was supposed to be HR.
First ~20 minutes:

• Project discussion
• Communication, background, experiences
• Then suddenly shifted to:
• Writing test cases for Amazon’s product cart system
• Questions on SDLC
• QA/testing workflows
• This felt more like a QA/SDET round, which was confusing given the role had been changed to ML Engineer Intern.

Round 3 – Technical Deep Dive (Most Confusing)

Asked to design a system:

• User submits a product review

• System determines positive vs negative

• Positive → redirect to thank-you page

• Negative → create ticket + redirect

• My approaches:

  • Transformer-based semantic embeddings → rejected (“No LLMs”)
  • ML-based approach → rejected

• Asked to write code

  • Constraints:
  • Language: Java
  • I implemented a basic working solution using weighted negative keywords.

• Then the round escalated into:

Sarcasm handling
JVM internals
Memory management
String vs StringBuilder(SCP)
Thread safety
JAR files
Spring Boot related questions

• At this point, it felt less like an intern evaluation and more like a stress test across unrelated areas. [my projects were in mern/pern stack]

Outcome

• After ~1 month:
• No candidate was selected

Posting this mainly to Share experience and Understand if this kind of process is normal.

Would love to hear thoughts from people who’ve interviewed at large companies recently.