One day out of nowhere I got an email from an Apple recruiter about an open position. Since the opportunity was there, I figured I'd interview and see how it went.
First round was directly with the hiring manager — we started by chatting through my resume. The team does RAG work, and it's basically an internal group that supports the hardware team as helpers. In the last 20 minutes, they opened up some tool I didn't recognize and had me do a quick RAG design, where the input needed to handle different modalities. My hands are a bit slow, so I spent forever drawing out the diagram. The next day I got notified for two rounds of technical interviews.
Tech round 1: the interviewer seemed friendly on the surface, but it turned out to be a minefield underneath. They asked about all kinds of technical choices — I mean, come on, how would a new grad have used that many different tools? The coding question was to implement a simple TF-IDF. I wrote pseudocode for it.
Tech round 2: the interviewer, self-described as the tech lead, didn't set any traps at all. The coding question was to write a generator: given a string and a pattern, return True whenever a substring of the string matches the pattern. I solved it quickly and felt pretty good about my answer.
The next day, they moved on with other candidates. Does Apple really just never give feedback and reject you this bluntly? Sigh, guess it's back to practicing.
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