ByteDance Machine Learning Engineering Internship Tech Phone Screen Experience

I interviewed for a summer intern position in the MLE recommendation team at TT. The first round was a call with HR, which was very simple; we just talked about availability, etc. At the end, the HR w

I interviewed for a summer intern position in the MLE recommendation team at TT. The first round was a call with HR, which was very simple; we just talked about availability, etc. At the end, the HR was very helpful and told me to remember to practice LeetCode, but don't believe them!!! I scheduled the first round of virtual interviews for the following week. The following content requires a score of 188 or higher to view: They started by reviewing my resume, and the questions were extremely detailed. My resume included information about LLM and RL, and they started asking me about the differences between different RLs, how to calculate their losses, etc. After reviewing my resume, they started with the standard transformer questions: positional encoding, rope, and implementation details. It was obvious I had failed at this point. The final coding question was to write the transformer loss function directly, without any hints, and they directly asked, "Don't you know that? It's the most basic one." Honestly, this was the most frustrating part for me. I hope this post can help others.