I finally landed the 26 summer offer that had been hanging over me. The role is SDE, ML PhD intern.
Timeline:
- Oct 14: HR reached out
- Oct 24: OA + Tech Screening
- Nov 2: Two Team Match interviews
- Nov 10: Moved into the hiring process
- Nov 26: Offer
The OA was basically the same questions people have already shared here, randomly pulled from the question bank — nothing harder than a Hard.
Technical Interview:
- Q1: Find the longest path between any two nodes in a tree. I nailed it with DFS — didn't have to run the code, but had to walk through the analysis in detail.
- Q2: Find the shortest path from the top-left to the bottom-right of an n x n matrix, with some cells blocked. Solved it with BFS.
- Follow-up: How would you modify it to find all paths from the top-left to the bottom-right of the n x n matrix?
Team Match:
- Team 1, the market scam and trust team. No rote trivia questions — they started by going through my resume, then asked a case study from the team, kind of like an ML system design question (my head was spinning a bit, an intern getting hit with sys design). Then Q&A.
- Team 2, MRS AI team. Also no trivia, just resume talk. They went through almost everything on my resume, and it felt like both sides were enjoying the conversation. Then they gave me a small verbal offer.
I ended up going with the MRS team.
During team match I was told almost everyone on the team is based in MPK, but when the offer came I was assigned to the NYC office, without being given a choice. I asked the HR manager about it, and the answer was that orientation would probably be in MPK, and then I'd spend the rest of the time in NYC, working remotely with the team.
Question for the veterans here: is it common for an intern to work remotely from their mentor? Does that hurt your final review and your chances of getting a return offer? Is a return offer something that's basically decided from the start, or does it mainly depend on the final review?
Discussion
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