I applied directly on disney.com to this position. Two months later, I received a frantic email from a recruiter (based out of Seattle) wanting to interview me almost immediately. I returned his call and left a message, then heard nothing for two weeks. Subsequently, I received another email urgently requesting an interview. Again, I replied and received no response for two weeks. Finally, on the third attempt, I answered the recruiter's call, and we had a good conversation. He expressed significant interest in my experience with machine learning and recommender systems but cautioned that the hiring manager was very particular. A few minutes after our call, I received a callback stating they wanted a technical discussion, which we scheduled for the following day.

In the technical discussion, I was very upfront about my background in machine learning and distributed architectures. Apparently, they sought someone to revamp their recommender system for Disney Interactive. The conversation went well, although I felt they perceived me as a "golden goose." An hour after our call, the recruiter contacted me to arrange travel for an onsite interview. By this time, I had decided against taking the position, as the Glendale location was not ideal. The recruiter suggested they could be flexible and would call me back.

The next day, I was informed that the offered salary was $30-40k higher than previously discussed, with annual 25% bonuses and an additional first-year guaranteed 25% bonus. Furthermore, I could work remotely from a location of my preference. They urged me to fly out as soon as possible, so I did.

During the onsite interview, I felt I was "slaughtered." To be fair, it was largely my fault for freezing up at the whiteboard. However, I was also being interviewed by future subordinates who were eager to discuss the intricacies of matrix algebra and demonstrate their existing expertise. I am not certain that all interviewers were aligned on their expectations.

Ultimately, the recruiter informed me that they had interviewed 20 people over six months and flown out six individuals besides myself.

Differentiate between supervised and unsupervised classification.

Diagram a distributed redundant architecture on the whiteboard.

How do you do matrix factorization for matrices that are too large to fit into memory?