Software Engineer Machine Learning Interview Questions

Practice 50 real Machine Learning interview questions for Software Engineer roles. From companies including Amazon, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google.

50 Questions 32 Companies08.06.2026
Showing 20 results
Role
Microsoft logo
Microsoft
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Explain normalization, regularization, CTR, imbalance handling

This question evaluates mastery of normalization methods, regularization techniques, click-through-rate modeling, and class-imbalance strategies, with...

Machine Learning
5
0
74 people solved
Feb 12, 2026
Waymo logo
Waymo
Medium
Software EngineerSenior+ Locked

Design an Online Experiment

This question evaluates experimental design and causal inference skills for production ML systems, including metric definition, randomization and trea...

Machine Learning
11
0
94 people solved
Feb 6, 2026
NVIDIA logo
NVIDIA
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Derive MLP shapes and explain PyTorch broadcasting

This question evaluates understanding of tensor shapes, linear layer forward computation, and deep-learning-framework broadcasting semantics. It is co...

Machine Learning
7
0
64 people solved
Jan 14, 2026
TikTok logo
TikTok
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Explain RL policy types and modern policy gradients

This question evaluates understanding of reinforcement learning policy types and modern policy-gradient techniques (TRPO, PPO, GAE) alongside attentio...

Machine Learning
6
0
55 people solved
Jan 11, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Medium
Software Engineer

Debug a Machine Learning Pipeline

Debugging a Sudden Accuracy Drop in a Deployed ML Pipeline Context You are on-call for a production machine learning service. Monitoring alerts show t...

Machine Learning
52
0
681 people solved
Aug 4, 2025
NVIDIA logo
NVIDIA
Medium
Software Engineer

Explain Transformers and QKV matrices

Transformer Self-Attention: Q, K, V, Multi-Head, and Positional Encoding You are given a sequence of token embeddings $X$ (sequence length $n$, model ...

Machine Learning
16
0
171 people solved
Jul 15, 2025
Google logo
Google
Medium
Software Engineer

Build a bigram next-word predictor with weighted sampling

You are given a training set of token sequences (sentences), for example: ` [["a","b","c"], ["a","s","d"]] ` 1) Train a simple next-word prediction m...

Machine Learning
7
0
107 people solved
Jan 11, 2026
xAI logo
xAI
Medium
Software Engineer

How Would You Prevent Hallucinations in an LLM-Based System?

You are interviewing for an AI-focused Software Engineer role at a company building products on top of large language models. During the screen, the i...

Machine Learning
2
0
46 people solved
Nov 21, 2025
Rippling logo
Rippling
Medium
Software Engineer

Find minimum of unknown convex function

You are given access to an unknown univariate convex function \(f(x)\) defined on a closed interval \([L, R]\) on the real line. - You cannot see the ...

Machine Learning
7
0
114 people solved
Dec 8, 2025
EliseAI logo
EliseAI
Medium
Software Engineer

Explain prompt engineering strategies for chatbots

Prompt Engineering for Reliable, Steerable, and Safe Chatbots Context You are designing a production-grade chatbot that must be reliable (consistent, ...

Machine Learning
18
0
138 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
TikTok logo
TikTok
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Implement AUC-ROC, softmax, and logistic regression

This question evaluates practical implementation skills for core machine learning components—computing AUC-ROC (including ROC point generation and han...

Machine Learning
8
0
68 people solved
Jan 22, 2026
NVIDIA logo
NVIDIA
Medium
Software Engineer

Compare deep learning framework trends

Compare deep learning framework trends This is an open-ended discussion question with two parts: 1. What high-level trends are happening at the deep l...

Machine Learning
8
0
61 people solved
Jul 31, 2025
Hudson logo
Hudson
Hard
Software EngineerNew Grad

Build a Heart Disease Baseline

You are given a tabular dataset for predicting whether a patient has heart disease. The dataset contains a binary target column such as has_heart_dise...

Machine Learning
4
0
67 people solved
Mar 13, 2026
NVIDIA logo
NVIDIA
Hard
Software Engineer

Explain optimization and tensor vs pipeline parallelism

Task: Deep Learning Optimization and Parallelism You are asked to explain optimization techniques commonly used to improve deep learning training and ...

Machine Learning
3
0
56 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Amazon logo
Amazon
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Explain overfitting, regularization, and LLM techniques

This question evaluates understanding of model generalization (overfitting vs underfitting), regularization methods (L1 vs L2), modern LLM techniques ...

Machine Learning
8
0
128 people solved
Feb 12, 2026
Ancestry logo
Ancestry
Medium
Software Engineer

Explain learning paradigms, loss, and embeddings

ML fundamentals (oral) Answer the following conceptual questions clearly and with examples: 1. What is supervised learning? What are typical inputs/la...

Machine Learning
5
0
41 people solved
Feb 11, 2026
TikTok logo
TikTok
Medium
Software Engineer

Explain DPO and construct its training data

You are working on a project to fine-tune a large language model (LLM) using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Answer the following: 1. Conceptual...

Machine Learning
4
0
51 people solved
Dec 8, 2025
Meta logo
Meta
Medium
Software Engineer

Explain key ML metrics and techniques

You are asked a set of short conceptual machine learning questions. 1. Confusion matrix and metrics For a binary classification problem: - Def...

Machine Learning
7
0
67 people solved
Dec 8, 2025
Microsoft logo
Microsoft
Medium
Software Engineer

Discuss large language models

Discuss large language models LLMs: Advances, Product Integration, Production Challenges, and Risk Mitigation Context You are interviewing for a Softw...

Machine Learning
3
0
60 people solved
Aug 4, 2025
Nextdoor logo
Nextdoor
Hard
Software Engineer

Build and evaluate a Colab classification model

Build and evaluate a Colab classification model End-to-End Tabular Classification Workflow in Google Colab You are asked to design and implement a com...

Machine Learning
9
0
66 people solved
Jul 31, 2025

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