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      Principal Machine Learning Engineer Interview

      May 10, 2023
      Anonymous interview candidate
      No offer
      Negative experience
      Average interview

      Application

      I applied online. I interviewed at Okta

      Interview

      Recruiter screen came first, super standard screen, very pleasant. Second was a technical screen with a staff data scientist, who was also very pleasant. Mostly centering around my experience as it related to the problems Okta is currently tackling. Dead simple coding question at the end involving 2 pointers (your first guess is probably correct). Positive experience here, got to ask tons of questions about what Okta is looking for and they were answered cogently. Next was a virtual on-site with three technical rounds. The first round was a systems design round with a principal architect. This was the best interview by far--pertinent systems design question relevant to my experience and what Okta was looking for, tons of time for discussing the role, super bright interviewer. The next two rounds were not good. Fourth round was a coding challenge with an architect involving sliding windows and data aggregations. Architect was not very friendly, and left time for precisely one question on my part. Coding problem was easy level in leetcode terms. Fifth round was a general ML experience interview with a staff data scientist, first half touched on topics like feature stores, model drift, and model deployment. Second half was a coding challenge, exact same problem as the initial coding screen indicating a lack of coordination between interviewers. I provided the absolutely optimal solution to the problem, interviewer was clearly not prepared for this and spent 15-20 minutes asking me to imagine less efficient solutions to the problem. This was followed with the interviewer blatantly googling questions to ask machine learning engineers during interviews and then posing them to me, i.e. "what is a significance test?", "how would you set up an A/B test?", leaving time for precisely two questions on my part. Overall, Okta does not know how to interview ML engineers at this level. 2/4 interviewers were hyper focused on coding problems at a level at which basic competency should be assumed, did very little to probe my experience, or provide me the opportunity to guide the interview and seemed generally disinterested in being in the interview. When I asked about their work, the staff level DS and the architect gave answers that I would expect from mid level people. I got the impression that they were pretty incompetent, and given that this is the face they're showing to candidates, I would be wary of an offer even if I'd gotten one.

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      Two coding questions, one involving 2 pointers (yep, that one), and one involving a sliding window + minor data aggregations.
      Answer question
      5