Role and interview process
The role is an MLE position related to Agents. A recruiter reached out to me, and there were three rounds of interviews in total.
Round 1: Recruiter call (30 minutes)
We talked about my background, my current job search status, what direction I want to go in, and my timeline. The recruiter was very friendly and gave a detailed introduction to the company, but said the specifics of the work would be covered by the Hiring Manager (HM) in the next round. After that, the HM interview was scheduled.
Round 2: HM interview (30 minutes)
We talked about projects I've done, and the HM asked about some technical details and background. No textbook trivia questions. The HM introduced the big-direction Agent-related projects the team is currently working on, and said a Phone Interview would be scheduled next.
Round 3: Phone Interview (1 hour)
It was originally scheduled with one interviewer, but they didn't show up on time. After waiting 15 minutes I contacted the recruiter and found out that interviewer couldn't make it and it had to be rescheduled. Then it was scheduled with a different interviewer.
The interview went like this:
- Quick self-introduction (5 minutes)
- LLM and Agent fundamentals Q&A (15 minutes): explain how the Transformer works and its details, beam search, LoRA, how an LLM calls tools, how to control the format of tool calls, how to make sure tool calling is stable, ways to fix a model that can't call tools correctly, and how to handle a tool-calling loop that runs too long.
- Coding (25 minutes): a variant of LeetCode 837
- Reverse Q&A (5 minutes)
That same day, the recruiter told me the candidate needs strong coding skills, I didn't pass that part, and so I didn't pass the interview.
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