After the initial HR call, I received an invitation for a 3.5-hour on-site technical "interview" in the middle of a working day. No late evening or early morning hours were available for taking the test.

I arrived for the interview, and the person who was supposed to interview me was sick. None of the other office workers had any idea I was coming.

After about 20 minutes of waiting, somebody eventually set up a computer for me to take the test on.

The test had three parts:

1. A LeetCode-style programming task (easy).
2. Ten open questions about LLM, RAG, and vision tasks.
3. Two "code filling" tasks:
   • Task 1: An LLM is producing wrong/inaccurate short answers. The task is to examine the prompt for the LLM and to tweak its hyperparameters (temp, num of tokens, etc.).
   • Task 2: You are given a "legacy" code snippet that trains a PyTorch vision classification model. The code is messy, incorrect, and lacks any documentation. Moreover, the trained model performs badly. The task is to rewrite/fix the code. Examples of errors in the code include:
     • The training validation loader was not used for validation (they used the train loader).
     • The mean loss calculation for each epoch was wrong.
     • The model was not set to "model.eval" before validation.
     • No metric logging was used.

After all of that, you are required to fill in a survey about the "interview process." They ask you about the "maximum appropriate length of the interview in your opinion" and other similar things, and ask if you would agree to take ANOTHER such interview in the future.

I finished all of the tasks. Nobody talked to me. I left the company offices alone. After about two weeks, I received a standard rejection call.

Open questions about LLMs:

• How would you evaluate a RAG solution?

Open questions about vision tasks:

• A model performs well on validation and testing data but fails in the real world. Why?
• Given two bounding boxes on an image, each tracking a car, how do you tell which is the correct box for each vehicle when they intersect?