Whatnot Machine Learning Engineer Interview Experience — A Weird Product Sense Round, Then Silence

The recruiter reached out before the new year, but it got pushed to after the new year before interviews actually started.

Whatnot is a livestream sales platform.

The recruiter screen was simple, just chatting about my background and interests. They quickly scheduled the HM interview.

The HM interview was half an hour, also mostly chatting about background and interests, but they did ask what improvement ideas and suggestions I had for Whatnot.

The chat with the HM went well too, and afterward they scheduled a round of ML System Design and a round of Product Sense.

ML System Design: Build a Trending Livestreams Service 2.0

For this round, they said the ML model already existed, you just had to call it. I answered following Alex Xu's ML System Design framework, but didn't get into the ML model part. The only follow-up I remember is how to guarantee a stream is actually live.

Product Sense — this round was Whatnot's unique one.

Right off the bat they asked what I thought of the app, and what suggestions and ideas I had.

Then they asked how to identify underperforming categories, then said suppose there's a bug, how would you debug it.

I talked about a lot of metrics, monitoring, and logs for debugging, and none of it was right. After going in circles for a while, I finally said I was honestly confused, so why not just open the app and try it to see what's wrong. I felt like that was the answer the interviewer wanted.

At the end I asked why they have this unique Product Sense round, and whether there's a PM on the team. The interviewer then explained at length.

After the interview, it just went silent. I waited a week and emailed to ask about the result, no response. I waited a few more days, and the recruiter finally wrote back saying they weren't moving forward, with no feedback or details. I don't know if asking why they have this Product Sense round is what caused the problem. But I do get the sense they really care about engineers thinking like users.

Whatever, whatever — I feel like this company's interview process is kind of weird, and honestly the recruiter was super unprofessional.