Machine Learning Engineer Machine Learning Interview Questions

Practice 217 real Machine Learning interview questions for Machine Learning Engineer roles. From companies including Amazon, OpenAI, Snapchat, Pinterest, TikTok.

217 Questions 73 Companies07.25.2026
Showing 20 results
Role
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Hard
Machine Learning Engineer

Compute Matrix Prefix Products And Gradients

You are given $N$ square matrices $A[0], A[1], \dots, A[N-1]$, each of shape $D \times D$. Define the inclusive prefix (cumulative) products: $$Y[i] =...

Machine Learning
77
0
795 people solved
Apr 2, 2026
Mistral AI logo
Mistral AI
Medium
Machine Learning Engineer

Optimize Nearest-Center Assignment Without Materializing NxKxD Distances

Given points X with shape N x D and cluster centers C with shape K x D, return an assignment for each point to its nearest center by L2 distance. The ...

Machine Learning
3
0
56 people solved
Jul 2, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Hard
Machine Learning Engineer Locked

Implement Backprop for a Tiny Network

This question evaluates understanding of backpropagation, gradient derivation, numerical stability of softmax cross-entropy, and practical implementat...

Machine Learning
175
0
1503 people solved
Apr 3, 2026
Google logo
Google
Medium
Machine Learning Engineer Locked

Explain ranking cold-start strategies

This question evaluates an engineer's competency in handling cold-start for users and items, constructing and applying content-based embeddings, organ...

Machine Learning
67
1
451 people solved
Mar 30, 2026
Amazon logo
Amazon
Medium
Machine Learning Engineer Locked

LLM Fundamentals: Tokenization Design and KL-Regularized SFT

This question evaluates depth of knowledge in large language model fundamentals, specifically subword tokenization design and KL-regularized supervise...

Machine Learning
11
0
151 people solved
Jun 18, 2026
Bytedance logo
Bytedance
Medium
Machine Learning Engineer

Explain Sampled-Softmax Correction and Classification Loss Choice

A recommendation model must choose one item from a very large catalog. Training approximates the full softmax by sampling negative items from a nonuni...

Machine Learning
0
0
6 people solved
Jul 24, 2026
Anthropic logo
Anthropic
Medium
Machine Learning Engineer Locked

Design a Double Descent Experiment

This question evaluates understanding of sample-wise double descent, experimental design for reproducible supervised-learning studies, and theoretical...

Machine Learning
75
0
1211 people solved
Apr 19, 2026
Cohere logo
Cohere
Medium
Machine Learning Engineer Locked

Explain Top-k and Top-p Decoding

This question evaluates understanding of autoregressive decoding strategies in probabilistic language models, assessing competency in reasoning about ...

Machine Learning
7
0
78 people solved
May 23, 2026
Adyen logo
Adyen
Easy
Machine Learning Engineer AI Locked

Build a Payment Fraud Detection Model

This question evaluates a candidate's competency in applied machine learning for payment fraud detection, covering data preprocessing, temporal train/...

Machine Learning
31
0
598 people solved
May 9, 2026
Mercor logo
Mercor
Medium
Machine Learning Engineer Locked

Evaluate Noisy Data for LLM Post-Training

This question evaluates competency in post-training data curation and experimental judgment for large language models, including assessing noisy datas...

Machine Learning
13
0
137 people solved
May 31, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Medium
Machine Learning Engineer Locked

Filter Bad Human Annotations

This question evaluates expertise in data quality and annotation filtering for machine learning, including annotator reliability modeling, noisy-label...

Machine Learning
125
0
1384 people solved
Apr 3, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Hard
Machine Learning Engineer

Derive Backpropagation for Matrix-Product Layers

Consider a neural-network block whose output is produced by multiplying a sequence of trainable weight matrices together, then applying the resulting ...

Machine Learning
51
0
594 people solved
Feb 5, 2026
Datadog logo
Datadog
Hard
Machine Learning Engineer Locked

Implement Grouped-Query Attention (GQA)

This question evaluates a candidate's understanding of transformer attention mechanisms, specifically how grouped-query attention balances the memory ...

Machine Learning
12
0
84 people solved
Jun 25, 2026
Apple logo
Apple
Easy
Machine Learning Engineer Locked

Implement Masked Multi-Head Self-Attention

This question evaluates implementation and conceptual understanding of masked multi-head self-attention, covering scaled dot-product attention, separa...

Machine Learning
55
0
395 people solved
Apr 4, 2026
Pinterest logo
Pinterest
Hard
Machine Learning Engineer Locked

Bias-Variance Tradeoff and Vanishing Gradients in Feedforward Networks

This question evaluates conceptual understanding of the bias-variance tradeoff and the vanishing-gradient problem in deep feedforward networks, two co...

Machine Learning
8
0
112 people solved
Jun 12, 2026
Datadog logo
Datadog
Hard
Machine Learning Engineer Locked

Implement Focal Loss for Class-Imbalanced Classification

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to implement a specialized loss function for class-imbalanced classification from basic tensor operation...

Machine Learning
4
0
54 people solved
Jun 25, 2026
Meta logo
Meta
Hard
Machine Learning Engineer Locked

Implement 1NN Embeddings and Forward Pass

This question evaluates proficiency in vectorized linear algebra and neural-network forward-pass implementation within the Machine Learning domain, co...

Machine Learning
11
0
137 people solved
May 19, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Medium
Machine Learning Engineer

Defend a Research Direction and Experiment Design

You are interviewing for a research-focused Machine Learning Engineer role at a frontier AI lab. The onsite includes a collaboration / research-discus...

Machine Learning
30
0
202 people solved
Apr 13, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Medium
Machine Learning Engineer Locked

Debug a Broken Transformer

This question evaluates proficiency in debugging and reconfiguring Transformer-based deep learning models, covering competencies in model internals (a...

Machine Learning
103
0
810 people solved
Mar 3, 2026
Jane Street logo
Jane Street
Hard
Machine Learning Engineer

Build a time-series forecasting model

Build a time-series forecasting model Forecast the Next H Steps for Time Series Context You are given one or more time series with timestamps and nume...

Machine Learning
46
0
561 people solved
Aug 1, 2025

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