I applied directly through their website in January 2018 and received a notification in April 2018. The entire process then took over a month.

My first interaction with Zillow was through an HR call. One of the HR representatives asked specific questions based on my resume and past experience, inquiring about my visa status, relocation preference, and my experience with my previous employer. At the end of the call, she stated she would do her best to match my experience with a relevant team at Zillow and sent me a HackerRank assessment.

As the second round, I was given 40 hours to complete a programming assessment on HackerRank. I chose to do it in Java. There were two moderately complex programming tasks which, given the time, could be easily solved. Thumbs up to that.

I received the results of the second round two weeks after my submission. A different HR representative emailed me, asking for my availability during the next two weeks for an interview with a Machine Learning Engineer at Zillow. I provided several dates within the next two weeks, and they chose one of them.

This is the part where things got finicky. During email conversations and on-call discussions, it was made clear that this upcoming interview would focus on my past experience and ML in general. I left no stone unturned to prepare the fundamentals of ML with coding in R to give it my best shot. (I could share my GitHub link to show how much I prepared for this, but then it wouldn't remain anonymous).

Seems like a good strategy, right? Wrong!

I received the call from the ML engineer at Zillow, who started the interview by asking for my introduction and some questions about what I did during my last internship. As I was given a HackerRank link prior to this interview for peer coding, we both logged into it. What came next was nothing short of a surprise. He began asking questions about data structures and manipulations, while he was supposed to discuss ML. It felt more like a software engineer interview and had nothing to do with ML.

I tried informing him that this was not what was supposed to be asked, as discussed with the HR representatives and in the emails, and that the position was for an ML engineer. However, he stated he would ask about data structures (apparently for no reason). So much effort writing KNN, NN, Regression, Clustering, etc., from scratch in R went to waste, as it seemed my interviewer wasn't interested in ML at all.

As I struggled through the interview, I tried hard, solving those tricky data structure questions, but could not solve any. It wasn't that I couldn't do it; it just came as a shock and caught me completely off guard. At the very end (in the 55th minute of the scheduled one-hour interview), he asked some concepts about ML algorithms, which I can say I nailed.

The next day, I emailed the second HR representative, informing her about the incident and requesting a proper ML interview (since I am still confident about my abilities for this position, as ML is what I do on a daily basis, being a Data Science graduate student). She never replied.

Two days later, I received a rejection email for the same, indicating "other candidates whose skills and experience better align with the needs for this role." (Sure).

Things that went wrong:

• Highly unreachable HRs: Emails were sent using Jobvite accounts. Due to some bug, I couldn't see those messages in Jobvite. I emailed the HR explaining the situation after the interview but am still waiting for a reply.
• Disregard for matching candidate's skills with the respective team: Although the HR representatives said they would best match my experience with a team at Zillow, I was surprised when my interviewer explained the technologies they work on daily. Since I work more in R and have little experience with Python (it isn't even listed on my resume), I would essentially have to start from scratch if I were ever to join that team. I am fine with learning new technologies and would have readily contributed to an R-based team, but this was a poor match by the HR department.

Good things about this experience:

• Everyone was very professional and courteous.
• Time management while juggling three graduate courses during ML preparation for this interview.
• No matter the position, you have to do some irrelevant HackerRank assessment (I don't know when the world will move past this, anyway!).

I really hoped to provide feedback to the team, but seeing their apathy towards communication, I'd rather tell you guys here. Hope it helps.

Data Structures and manipulation.

ML Algorithms and their inner workings and details (be thorough with this).