First, a chat with the recruiter. Then, an interview with the two heads of the AI/quantum computing research division, covering technical questions. I don’t know the rest of the process because I didn’t make it further.

Extremely technical, obscure questions related to what they, in particular, have recently read.

For example, questions on “efficient” ways to reduce the dimensionality of a very large weight matrix. The answer isn’t even LORA rank decomposition; it’s randomly removing rows and columns. Why can this work? Some obscure mathematics field I’d not heard of, even with a Master’s in Physics and PhD in ML. Very frustrating, in my opinion, but in fairness, it does reflect what they were looking for.