I am going through the team match process at Google (hiring committee is done). Also have a verbal offer from Dropbox, and an almost offer from FB (going through VP approval). Have ~10 years of experience building ML models in finance, and a PhD from a top 5 Engineering school before that. Anyone here work on ML at google and hiring? If it matters, level is either T5 or T6, but most likely T5. For all the TC or GTFO folks - don't know TC yet for any of the offers.
Google DeepMind team in MTV
Congrats @op. What were the interview breakdowns like and how hard were coding rounds?
Interview breakdowns? As in how many coding and design? TBH, Blind scared me about coding interviews - need 300 LeetCode solved to have a shot. They were much easier than I was expecting - having a person on the other side to talk to is invaluable. You get a lot of hints from body language. FB had 2 coding rounds. Both had 2 mediums, but for the second problem I only finished coding the important parts. GOOG had 2 coding. One was LeetCode hard, but I think it's overrated - medium is a better description. The other ended up digressing into a 30 minute conversation about least-squares. Dropbox had 2 coding rounds. These were the hardest, but only because they were non-standard so LeetCode practice mattered less. One involved writing a multi-threaded program. I ended up getting through every phone and onsite interview, except for one phone screen at Plaid.
Thanks for the detailed answer. This is exactly what I was curious about.
Congrats OP. Is your current role more modeling or coding heavy? Do you have a sense of what it will be like for the G and FB roles?
My current role involves a lot of coding. Expect similar at G and FB. Were you asking if i'm a data scientist in my current job - where I build a model and someone else 'productionizes' it?
Ping me for some internal advice both for google and Facebook.
Hey OP! Which team did you finally pick? I have similar background but less YOE (6). Trying to target the SWE-ML role.
Good luck! It still would be interesting to find the results of these negotiations. Please, keep us posted.
Thanks. Will post once I know. I'm not optimizing for TC though - it will likely be 40-50% of my current comp, given all the T5 offers I've seen on Blind.