Walmart Labs Senior+ Machine Learning Engineer Interview Experience — A Surprise Agentic Search Design Round

Sharing a data point. I mainly used this as a warm-up and for practice, and I pretty much didn't plan to join. This position was entirely team-specific hiring, so it could vary a lot case by case. The logistics were quite chaotic, but the conversations themselves were a pretty good experience.
The first round was with the hiring manager: a casual half-hour conversation about project experience and some ML domain knowledge.
The second round was a phone screen. The recruiter said it would be coding, but an interviewer showed up and spent an hour asking about my resume.
The third round was a phone screen: an hour with an interviewer, mixing projects, ML domain knowledge, mini system design, etc.
The onsite had two rounds. The first was another hour of behavioral questions with the hiring manager, focused on resolving conflicts and aligning with other teams, both technically and non-technically.
The second was with a fellow. The recruiter said it would be a project deep dive, but the fellow walked in and said, let's design an agentic search experience. All right, another hour of talking things through. The fellow didn't dig into details; hitting the points he wanted was enough, and he didn't ask about the specific implementation.