I want to talk about the mindset and the whole prep process for this interview. If you're not interested, feel free to skip straight to the write-up below.
The most important thing: be humble and ask others for help (don't be shy about it — if you want to learn from people, you have to spend time building relationships. It's not about getting someone to hand you all the answers, it's about genuinely asking for guidance). During my prep, before every single round I talked with two or three people — I mean every round — and just talking with them about the company/role/interview took at least 7-8 hours total (and that's just to get oriented). They were all people who either knew the role well or had worked at NVIDIA.
I never actually met the friend who referred me in person — we only talked on the phone once, for about an hour. He was really nice and walked me through the role from every angle, in far more detail than the job description gave. (If you spend the time to actually understand the company/job, you can tell the interviewer you went and asked people about it — it shows you're serious and committed.)
Every time I got an interview invite, they'd tell me the interviewer's name, and I would always go look them up on LinkedIn — hobbies (cooking, blood donation, sports, gaming, neuroscience, signal processing), work history (career changes), where they went to school, whether they were born in the US, whether their undergrad and master's were in the same field, activities outside of work, and so on, to try to get a read on this interviewer's personality and how they talk.
The reason for doing this: 1. You end up knowing more about the interviewer than they know about you, which gives you confidence. 2. Once you've done that homework, it's a lot easier to connect with them, bring up topics they're interested in, ask questions they'd find interesting, and keep the conversation flowing — they'll walk away with a good impression of you (like, "we clicked"), and they'll know you came prepared.
For every piece of work experience, every research project, every project on my resume: I prepared two versions of the story. The first was the short version (STAR format, just cover what you did, keep it summarized, don't throw in unnecessary detail). The second was the detailed version (if the short version lands well, the interviewer is going to want to dig in and ask about specifics — that's what the detailed version is for). For both versions of every story, I had someone with strong English run through them with me to check whether what I was saying actually made sense to a listener.
Behavioral questions: I prepared for every question I could think of that might come up (elevator pitch, conflicts, customer-facing situations, most challenging project, a project you failed on, leadership, where do you see yourself in 5 years, etc.)
Every round was a video interview, so I could write out every story and every BQ answer ahead of time and basically read off it during the interview. I almost never ran into a situation where I wasn't prepared. I ended up with a 13-page Google Doc (happy to share if anyone's interested) that had, besides the stories and BQ answers, technical questions I thought might come up, background info on each interviewer, questions tailored to each specific interviewer, and advice from everyone who helped me — all so I'd actually remember it all.
Timeline:
- 9/14: got the invite for round 1 (video)
- 9/23: round 1 video interview
- 9/28: got the invite for round 2 (video)
- 10/2: round 2 video interview
- 10/6: got the invite for the virtual onsite (6 rounds total)
- 10/15: virtual onsite, 4 rounds
- 10/16: virtual onsite, 2 rounds
- 10/16: unofficial offer, over email
9/23: Round 1 video interview
Hiring manager.
Questions: 1. Why NVIDIA? 2. Why this role?
We talked through my resume and culture fit (they care a LOT about culture fit — really listen to what the interviewer says about the team/company and give feedback in the moment that shows you're on the same page).
10/2: Round 2 video interview
Manager from the healthcare team.
He only asked about one thing on my resume (he told me upfront he'd only ask about one experience, and the rest would get covered by other interviewers).
Questions: 1. Explain overfitting 2. Explain DenseNet 3. Explain data preprocessing 4. Explain hyperparameters 5. Explain cross-validation
10/15: Virtual onsite, round 1 of 4
An interviewer on the NLP team.
We talked through my resume (2-3 experiences) — his questions were pointed and went deep.
Coding: Reverse a linked list
Questions: 1. Explain web APIs 2. Explain CUDA
10/15: Virtual onsite, round 2 of 4
An interviewer from the Sales/Account side of the team (not technical at all — he only cared about whether you're a good fit for sales and can work with people).
Questions: 1. If you wanted to sell NVIDIA GPUs to the CEO of Walmart, how would you approach it?
10/15: Virtual onsite, round 3 of 4
An interviewer with a PhD on the team, working on CV and video analysis.
Questions: 1. How do you do matrix multiplication on CUDA?
10/15: Virtual onsite, round 4 of 4
An interviewer on the team who went to MIT — really funny, we laughed the whole interview.
The whole round was just him asking about the healthcare/medical projects on my resume that he was personally interested in.
10/16: Virtual onsite, round 1 of 2
An interviewer working on IoT/Robotics on the team, who'd spent ten years at Altera before this.
Same as before — mostly about the experiences on my resume that he found interesting, but luckily I'd prepared for all of it.
Questions: 1. Conflicts? 2. Describe a project you failed on.
10/16: Virtual onsite, round 2 of 2
The last round was the hiring manager again.
No resume talk at all this time — just how I felt about the whole interview process and what I'd learned from it.
You could tell from this round whether the hiring manager was planning to make you an offer.
Discussion
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