After six rounds of interviews they told me straight up that the position was on hold, and a month later they let me know the position had been cancelled.
I suspect the interviewers had known about this for a long time, which is why the interviews were so all over the place and never lined up with anything. The questions I spent ages preparing were basically wasted effort. I'm sharing the questions I ran into, in hopes my next interview goes better.
Round 1: HR. Nothing much to say. We talked about the package, RTO is mandatory three days a week, and the Berlin office is sooooo far away.
Round 2: Coding / software engineering, data structures, computer science
- Interviewed by a senior MLE from another team
- One LC easy
- My experience with Docker
- How to optimize Docker
- My experience with MLE engineering work
Round 3: Statistics / Machine Learning / AI
- Interviewed by a senior AS from the team
- What projects I've done
- Why I chose that algorithm
- How I optimized over the previous version
- BERT inference optimization
- Offline metrics
- A/B test metrics
- All kinds of Docker questions
- One LC easy
Round 4: ML / AI System Design and Big Data
- Interviewed by a senior AS manager from another team
- A time I went beyond scope
- What projects I've worked on recently
- Explain the NER problem
- What algorithms are there for NER, and how do you make the decision
- How to process the data, how to choose metrics
- Pros and cons of the algorithms
- Given a project problem, come up with a solution on the spot
- Search queries: given tens of millions of listings, how do you quickly retrieve the relevant results
- Kept digging deeper into the solution I gave
Round 5: eBay DNA / Product / Business Reasoning
- Interviewed by the team's hiring manager
- Behavioral questions
- Why do you want to work at a big company spread across time zones instead of going to a small company (this is when I felt the landmine had already been planted)
- The position has a lot of on-call, how do you stay motivated
- Why this position
- If you have a conflict with your manager, how do you handle it? If communication doesn't work, what do you do?
- If a task from your +2 can't be finished on time, what's your next step?
- Docker experience, Docker theory questions.
- CI/CD theory questions. (I really don't get why they needed to go into this)
From start to finish, the instructions HR sent me had nothing to do with what the interviews were actually like. Basically every round was a deep dive into my project experience, to the point where I started wondering if they were just scouting out what the competition was up to. Looking back now, they all knew the position didn't exist anymore, so they were just killing time. Honestly, all I can do is laugh...
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