I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Walt Disney Company (New York, NY) in Aug 2025
Interview
These were the interviews I had:
- Recruiter
- Hiring manager
- 2 System design: can't remember the topic of the first one, second one was RAG
- 2 behavioral: e.g. What do you do when someone more senior than you disagrees with your approach? What if this person was more junior than you?
- Chat with a principal engineer (the next level up from lead)
Surprisingly there was no coding interview even though the recruiter said there would be one. I don't know if someone messed up or if that's normal for this position. I felt like I did well on all the interviews.
The recruiter said i should hear back within a week after the last interview. I didn't hear anything back and emailed but got no response until two weeks later saying they selected someone else. I'm assuming they kept me on the hook as a backup in case the person they selected declined the offer. I didn't feel great waiting around for an answer but unfortunately, that seems to be the norm these days.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
- Design a RAG system
- What do you do when someone more senior than you disagrees with your approach? What if this person was more junior than you?
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Walt Disney Company
Interview
Chat with recruiter, chat with hiring manager to assess fit, interactive technical screen in a Jupyter notebook to assess machine learning proficiency, technical architecture discussion on using AWS and other MLOps tech stack components and screen. Technical interview screen was scheduled for a Friday evening. Interviewer seemed unhappy and exhausted. The questions were haphazard and seemingly random as opposed to being consistent across candidates. While the role was a lead level machine learning engineer, the interviewer seemed more focused on data science oriented proficiencies.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Using a dataset provided, train a machine learning model around forecasting