The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Credit Karma (Oakland, CA)
Interview
The position was for a senior DS role.
Overall Process:
Recruiter => Hiring Manager => Leet Coding & Basic ML => Onsite Technical [Two Rounds: 1) Recommendation Systems; 2) General ML Recommendation Systems & System Design]
**Pros**: Interviewers were respectful, patient, and would listen carefully to your responses.
**Cons**:
[I]. Poor Communications and Scheduling:
At every round, it was not clear what next steps are, what to expect in every round, and what to study. I had to send multiple follow up emails to extract answers to the above. Specially, what would be covered, or even when my interviews would happen. Multiple times rescheduling had to happen due to delayed responses. Also, having ~5-6 people from HR involved in most email threads added to the confusion.
[II]. Received an automated rejection email after ~3 months and 5 rounds of interviews. Frustrating...
[III]. During one of the onsite (held virtually) interview rounds, the interviewer was on-call and had to respond to urgent slack messages (w/ camera turning on/off a few times). While the interviewer had warned me at the beginning, nevertheless, it was a confusing setup which distracted me from focusing on solving the problem properly.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Leetcode: Dynamic Programming
ML Basics, kNN vs ANN (why each, when to use each...)
Depth and breadth knowledge in recommendation systems. Flexible by design and dependent on your answers, e.g. two tower models, benefits of different embeddings (when/why to use each), constructing the loss/cost function when training the models, know when/where/how it ties to business metrics & needs.
After 5 stages of interview, got ghosted by recruiter. He promised to call back multiple times over a course of few weeks, but never did. Everytime I provided a date and time, and he never called. It was very weird, but also just disrespectful and rude.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Some SQL and leetcode medium question in the tech screen.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Credit Karma (San Francisco, CA) in Sept 2018
Interview
I applied online and was also recommended by an alumni working there, in a different department.
They sent me an email for a first HR round, which went well. They asked only basic questions about myself, my studies, my projects and my expectations for a first job
Then, a week later, I had a technical interview with a Machine Learning engineer. He asked theoretical questions about Deep Learning, that were not specific but without giving too many clues on the right direction to answer. It felt like he learned by heart some notions before the interview and could not explain thoroughly what the question was.
I also had a coding question, on an online IDE. The question was basic but tabulations and coding shortcuts did not work on this website
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Could you explain how, in your mind, do the functions of Data Scientist and Machine Learning Engineer differ ?
