This interview was purely a case of getting lucky. I got the interview invite on 4/12, then had two VO (virtual onsite) rounds back to back on 4/22, with no break in between. Both interviewers held PhDs.
VO1
Standard LP (Leadership Principles) questions, and then they dug into a lot of detail based on my answers.
- Tell me about a most recent project
- Calculated risk
- A time you needed to extend a deadline
- A time you needed to make a fast decision
- How do you convince your teammates when they disagree with you
- A time you led a team
- A surprise obstacle or challenge
- A time you needed to learn something totally new to you
They asked a lot of these, and I felt like the LP questions were the most important part.
Then we moved on to the technical part. At first they wanted me to write command line, but I wasn't very comfortable with it, so we switched to SQL instead. I did 3 very simple SQL problems. Basically if you know window functions and CTEs you can get through them — easy-to-medium difficulty. I hadn't done SQL before this, I crammed for it for one afternoon, and that was completely enough.
VO2
Lots of LP questions again, mostly similar to the previous round so I won't repeat them. They also asked:
- Why Amazon
- Why this position
- Tell me about an NLP project you've done
- Are you curious about anything in the NLP field? (roughly: while working on your NLP-related projects, was there anything you found particularly interesting or curious about — like something you thought needed to be solved or improved)
- DDL
- ML fundamentals (basic ML trivia questions)
- How would you explain a confusion matrix to a group of high schoolers
- Precision, recall, F1, AUC
- When do you use precision vs. recall
- How do you evaluate a model if it's multi-class
- What is cross entropy
- Have you ever run into a situation where manual evaluation was better than using an automated metric/function
That's roughly all of it, I don't remember the rest, but they were all fairly basic fundamentals questions too.
Both interviewers gave off a lot of positive energy, and the conversation was really pleasant. Not sure if I'll get an offer though.
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