Im going to FB onsite in two weeks to join their Applied Machine Learning group. Recruiter told me there will be a “system-design” interview, with questions like how would you design instagram, unrelated to ML. I am all about answering questions on how to scale DNN training, learning algorithms, or hardwares to train with lot of GPUs, but I have no experience in things like noSQL, load balancer,.... I start reading about it to prepare and its a lot of knowledge that I feel I will never have to use, at least I hope. Do you think this type of interview makes sense for ML positions ? Will I not do that much ML if hired to AML ? The team and project I would join seem really interesting though, with lot of ML research to do. Also how to prepare to not be too awful as this interview, if no experience, and only 2 weeks. I am more optimistic about the other ones (2 leetcodes type, 1 ML, 1 behavioral)
Are you referring to the system design round or did your recruiter say you would have separate ML design round and system design round? What's your YOE?
Yes I will have both. ML design makes sense to me. Its for senior position, 8 yoe
Got it, I have an on-site coming up as well. DM me if you want to discuss further.
If you really nail the ML interview, you’ll get hired even if general system design doesn’t go too well. However, you should prepare extensively for both.
Do you mind sharing tips on how to prepare for the ML round? And what kind of questions can we expect?
Same as general system design, but for ML. You want to be able to build a system from scratch. Take a problem, e.g. news feed ranking, and think about all aspects - what ranking model to use, what features, how to set up training, where to get data, what problems you might run into, how to debug them, etc. Dive into each of these, consider the trade offs, find the limits of your understanding and try to push them. Good luck
[Blind] Check out this post! ML interview questions (Tech Lounge) https://us.teamblind.com/s/qP3yeK4E
It’s not fair to ask that from ml candidates, but I’ve seen it happen. Search for the system design primer on github, look at grokking the system design interview course. That should be the best you could do in two weeks.
Google what positions do you think will be fair to ask for sys design questions? It’s just that I haven’t seen such problems in my day to day work as an engineer either.
I sympathize with your concern, I’ve been in the same boat before. If the recruiter tells you they are going to ask these type of questions, you’d better believe them. The pointers I gave above could be useful.