HR screening call
Online coding assessment
Onsite interview (Coding + ML Knowledge + a so-called "System Design" round)
Regarding the "System Design" round: The label is misleading — the actual content bears little resemblance to what is conventionally understood as system design.
There is a significant disconnect between the job title and the actual responsibilities.
The role is advertised as a "Machine Learning Engineer," yet the work has virtually nothing to do with machine learning. In practice, it functions as a standard Software Development Engineer (SDE) role, where the primary task revolves around copying and pasting code from .ipynb files. Do not be misled by the title.
The team's production engineering capability is a serious concern.
Researchers broadly lack hands-on experience in deploying models to real-world production environments. Their technical scope appears confined to the Notebook stage — comparable to undergraduate coursework. This becomes particularly evident in concrete scenarios:
For example, when using vLLM for inference, Greedy Decoding can still produce non-deterministic outputs under certain conditions — a well-known and fairly fundamental engineering challenge in production ML inference. A team member with 4 years of industry experience was entirely unaware of this, which speaks to a notable gap in the team's practical ML engineering knowledge.
The team's understanding of machine learning appears largely conceptual and rote, with limited capacity to tackle real engineering problems. The culture leans heavily academic, with little awareness of the considerations that matter in productization — such as latency, output determinism, observability, and deployment cost.
Bottom line:
If you are seeking genuinely challenging ML engineering work — spanning inference optimization, production deployment, and system reliability — this team's current state is unlikely to meet your growth expectations. It is strongly advisable to probe the team's actual technical stack and real-world deployment track record before committing to the process.
