I applied online. I interviewed at Preference Model in May 2026
Interview
young MLE was interviewer. 45 min long virtual interview. recruiters were helpful and efficient. interviewer did not participate or want to hear the thought process, was occupied working on something else. 45 min of solo coding essentially. you can google any documentation but no AI.
I applied online. I interviewed at Preference Model in May 2026
Interview
After one initial task and an initial interview, I was told I reached the final stage of the interview process and I was given the choice between a take home task and a live coding interview, of which I choose the take home. I spent a full 40 unpaid hours on the take home task over the course of a week and really poured my soul into it, thinking that since this was the last thing, if I could just do a great job on it, I would get the offer. They said they liked it (looking back, don't think they even looked) and reach out about a final-final 30 minute interview just to go over the task with them. However, I show up, only to blindsided by them saying that they changed their mind and are doing a live coding interview anyways! With absolutely no warning or preparation, and it felt like they didn't even look at my take home even though I spent so long on it. Not only that but that it went way over the allotted 30 minutes and no one checked whether this was ok with me (I ended up super late for a meeting I had right afterwards). The interviewers did however check in with eachother about the time and asked eachother if it was ok, in a way that felt uncomfortable and disrespectful as a woman interviewing with 3 men. I have never felt more disrespected in an interview before and it is clear to me that this company does not value their candidates time, even in the final round when I had already invested so much labor into this company. I feel like they essentially told me to do this task, I spent a full week on it unpaid, and then they just threw it in the trash.
I have had plenty of bad interviews but never one as disrespectful to my time as this company. I would not recommend associating with them in any way.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
They said it was going to be a review of a 40 hour unpaid take home task they gave me, then I got there and they made it a suprise technical interview where I had to implement an MLP from scratch (which I totally could've done under any normal circumstances!) that went double the time scheduled, never asking if this was ok, and also never telling me that the time was extended so I was thrown off thinking they wanted me to implement it all in 5 minutes, as they brought it up 25 minutes into a 30 minute interview.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Preference Model (California, MD) in Mar 2026
Interview
First, a headhunter on LinkedIn reached out, saying that my profile matched what they wanted. So, we had a google meeting 10 min ''interview'', where she said a lot about this company, it would be big, they had funding. etc.
After that, I received a kind of ''homework'' where I had to describe a LLM environment I think it is interesting, according to my background.
In the last round, I had a very strange 15-min call with someone from Preference model. Here things started to get very strange. 1) They got late and did not even send me the meeting link, so, after the agreed time to start, they send me the link 2) It was a very young kid, that did not even know how to behave himself in a interview, no ''greetings'', nothing, just some questions. 3) This person did not even listened to our answers, he had a set of interview questions and he wanted to pass though all of the items. It was a very unpleasing experience.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
- How to prevent a llm from Reward Hacking?
- How to prevent problems from low precision in mmm?
- What are the problems suitable for being executed on TPUs?
- What's the math intensity of mmm? How does it grown accordingly to the input size?