I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in Feb 2018
Interview
The Hiring manager contacted me on LinkedIn. The team seemed really excited by my profile and I had the first round of interview with the team lead. It was purely ML based questions and I was able to answer them all. For the second round they send me an online coding challenge, which didn't relate to ML, was more about datastructues and algorithms. I did decent on that challenge but didn't get a call for the next interview round.
I was assuming they would give more weightage to my ML skills rather than some optimizations I might have missed on coding challenge and was pretty disappointed to not hear back.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Bias-variance, Overfitting, and some other basic ML concepts
Some problems related to transfer learning
Some problems related to scaling the algorithm
The phone screen was straightforward, starting with some basic algorithm questions. After a few minutes of discussing my background, we dove into a coding challenge about finding two numbers that sum to a target. I enjoyed explaining both the brute-force method and the optimized hash map approach. The wild part was that I had practiced a similar problem on PracHub just a few days earlier, so it felt familiar. Following this, there was a technical round focused on machine learning concepts, which went smoothly before I received a written offer. Overall, a positive and engaging experience.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an array of integers, find two numbers that sum to a target value. Start with a brute-force O(n^2) approach, then optimize using a hash map to O(n). Walk through edge cases (duplicates, negative numbers, no valid pair) and discuss the space-time tradeoff.
The interview process was smooth, and the interviewer was professional and friendly. It was online and took about 35 minutes. The recruiter will give you some guidelines on how to prepare.
Only had first round, a recruiter reached out to me as I had applied for another role. the total time to interview was 2 weeks. One recruiter interview and then with the hiring manager
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Low level system design about designing a ranking system based on the number of sales of a product as well as taking into consideration the time complexity. had to do some in O(logn)