After the initial screen with the recruiter, they arranged a first technical interview - a coding interview (45 minutes). In their email, it was called an ML coding interview, but in the same email, in the attached Waymo prep PDF file, this coding interview was described as typical DSA/LeetCode style. I emailed the recruiter (Tony W.) asking what I should expect and requesting clarification, but he ghosted both of my emails. So, I prepared for both LeetCode-style and ML coding interviews.
I asked to reschedule the interview, and they rescheduled it the same day, proving they were reading my emails, so I don't know why the recruiter ghosted me throughout the whole process; he literally couldn’t have cared less. I asked a random person from Waymo about their process, and they said their recruiter prepared them very well, which is the opposite of my experience.
One hour before the coding interview, they changed the interviewer. During the coding interview (45 minutes), the interviewer asked me about my CV, projects, etc., for 15 minutes. Then he spent several minutes copying the coding problem into CoderPad, and it was neither LeetCode style nor ML coding. It was some weird data-wrangling, non-algorithmic task, with no text explanations or anything like that. For the rest of the interview, I tried to understand the code and data format, and I asked the interviewer about the problem, but I couldn’t understand any of his explanations.
So, I hope you will have better experience.