Microsoft Machine Learning Engineer Interview Experience — Four Rounds on the Bing Team, No Offer

I applied to several MAI positions on the site, and then a Bing team doing image search got back to me and said they wanted to schedule an interview.

First, let me complain about the HR — from the email address, it's clearly outsourced, and they never reply. For example, I asked what kind of interview this was, what it would cover, how many rounds — no idea at all. They'd only show up two or three days ahead of time and send a meeting invite.

My HR showed up twice — the first time scheduling two rounds that same week, the second time scheduling two more rounds the following week. I guess that counts as a full loop. Either way, the final result was a rejection.

Round 1: ML fundamentals (the usual ML trivia questions, not hard); coding was k-means.

Round 2: project deep dive; some questions related to LLMs and transformers.

Round 3: system design — design a product search system; coding was a LeetCode problem I hadn't seen before, so I only managed to write the brute force solution. I looked it up afterward — the optimal solution relies on some math pattern, which honestly seems pretty hard to come up with on the spot.

Round 4: the interviewer was based in China, mostly project deep dive — asked very detailed, very deep questions; behavioral questions were about what to do if you can't get another team to do work for you, and what to do if your scope overlaps with another team's (is that really how it works at Bing? lol).

Overall it felt kind of off. A few weeks later I got the rejection. This position has been open for almost half a year now — feels like they're not in a hurry to fill it.