Giving back the community. Hope this helps ya'll in your preparation.

Phone Screen

Quesiton 1: Variation of 71. Simplify Path (MEDIUM)
Leetcode URL: https://leetcode.com/problems/simplify-path/description/
Actual Question asked in interview: (cwd and cd variation)

Question 2: Variation of 282. Expression Add Operator (HARD)
Leetcode URL: https://leetcode.com/problems/expression-add-operators/description/
Info on variation: You have only option to add or subtract instead of original problem. But the variation is that the operators is not between just digits but numbers.
For example, given num = 123456789, target = 100, return all possible combinations of numbers that add up to target.
Output: ["-1+2-3+4+5+6+78+9", "1+2+3-4+5+6+78+9", "1+2+34-5+67-8+9", "1+23-4+5+6+78-9", "1+23-4+56+7+8+9", "12+3+4+5-6-7+89", "12+3-4+5+67+8+9", "12-3-4+5-6+7+89", "123+4-5+67-89", "123+45-67+8-9", "123-4-5-6-7+8-9", "123-45-67+89"]

My Experience: I totally bombed both the questions and I was pretty sure I was not going to be selected for next round. To my surprise, they gave low hire and proceeded. (I assume due to AI cheating tools, they want to filter more candidates by asking difficult question at phone screen)

Loop

Coding Round 1:

Question 1: Variation of 480. Sliding Window Median (EASY-MEDIUM)
Leetcode URL: https://leetcode.com/problems/sliding-window-median/description/
Actual Question asked in interview: Instead of median, I was asked to calculate the average of the numbers in the window and return result. (I guess it is east-medium)

Question 2: Variation of 415. Add Strings (MEDIUM-HARD)
Leetcode URL: https://leetcode.com/problems/sliding-window-median/description/
Actual Question asked in interview: (Decimal Variation)

My Experience: I thought I did well by answering both because I knew them. Later I got review that since I used ljust and zfill functions and they thought the answers were appearing as if it was not coming form me. (Sutle way of accusing I was cheating) and the reason was for using in-built functions. Anyways moving ahead...

Coding Round 2:

Question 1: 314. Binary Tree Vertical Order Traversal (MEDIUM)
Leetcode URL: https://leetcode.com/problems/binary-tree-vertical-order-traversal/description/

Question 2: Variation of 146. LRU Cache (MEDIUM)
Leetcode URL: https://leetcode.com/problems/lru-cache/description/
Actual Question asked in interview: (delete and last)

My Experience: I knew both of them. Coded in less than 35 min. Went great.

ML Design Round:

Question: Design an app that recommends places near you.

My experience: It is very confusing what to prioritize. The resources recruiter sends to follow clearly tells to emphasize on Data, Feature Engineering, High Level Design, IN_DEPTH Modeling - loss functions, Evaluation(online, offline), Serving, Deployment, Monitoring, A/B Testing. While I was still at Data sources, the interviewer jumped to ask about Modeling, then jumped to evaluation, came back to loss function and never was interested in Feature Engineering or serving or whatever the resources said. And since this was for IC5/E5 I was prepared in this structured and also at the end to talk about user experience and revenue to emphasize more as a senior ML engineer, but, I could never discuss those.

My opinion: It depends on the interviewer. Ride the flow of the interviewer. Do not completely follow text book advices which you get from recruiter. If you are applying for ML Engineering, just shut everything and focus on modeling, candidate generation, ranking, trade offs, loss functions etc. That is the core. You can later discuss about less relevant things.

Behavioral Round:

Pretty much straight forward questions: Talk about proud project, time about you handled criticism, time when requirements were not specific, time about a time you failed, time when you had to explain technical stuff to a non technical person.

Result:

REJECTED (lol obviously)

I already knew this but still it was a great experience. The recruiters were really helpful and supportive. They even took a behavioral mock before the loop even started (also one of the reason I did great on behavoral). And there is nothing one can do about coding. It is a combination of luck and your practice. If you have never seen the coding question, forget about writing optimal solution on spot in less than 15-20 min. Pray your god and close the laptop.

Jokes apart, I realised the areas that I should work on. I am planning to work on those areas and be prepared. Until then, keep learning and keep hustling folks. Good Luck!

😮‍💨 Phew! The whole process took so much energy out of me. Need a break and drink Glen 18 or Macallan 25!