Apple AI/ML SWE internship - SII group interview experience

I dropped my resume in Apple's "Machine Learning / AI Internships" in September, and did the final interview yesterday. Here's a summary for those interested. There was no info when I was researching

I dropped my resume in Apple's "Machine Learning / AI Internships" in September, and did the final interview yesterday. Here's a summary for those interested. There was no info when I was researching before my interviews... # Initial recruiter email - December 18, 2024 I got an email asking me to confirm my graduation date, send my updated resume, and send my availability for two interviews. The email didn't contain a job description or anything (remember that the job posting was also very generic), so I asked him to also send that after I sent the initial info. The job description didn't mention any specific technologies either. Here it is: Title: "AI/ML SWE internship - SII group" """ Siri’s Core Orchestration team is looking for resourceful software engineer intern to develop Siri’s next generation of natural interaction platforms on Apple’s innovative devices! The team defines the very core of Siri, building the foundations that power Siri voice assistant and Dictation across billions of Apple devices. You should be eager to do hands-on work to improve and build features to help improve overall Siri capabilities. You should enjoy working in a rapidly changing environment with changing priorities, be passionate about using new technologies to solve real problems and to improve the state of intelligent assistants. """ I had a bunch of LLM and text-to-speech projects on my resume so that probably helped.

Interview 1 - 01/07/2025 - 45 mins This was purely about my background. No coding, no weird "what would you do if..." questions, and no technical questions about RNNs or transformer networks. The interviewer told me what his team did. He then asked me to give him a summary about my background, and followed up telling me to start talking about a complex project I had worked on. I picked a project where I had used an LLM and a TTS model for summarizing news. He kept grilling me about the details and how I solved the issues I faced, and finally asked me how I would reduce the footprint of the system. From what I remember his team wasn't in charge of developing original models, but worked on the infrastructure and interfaces of the models. He said, for example, that they would try to figure out how much they could do on-device on an apple watch. I think this went very well. The interviewer wished me good luck and said he looked forward to working with me.

Interview 2 - 01/07/2025 - 60 mins This interview consisted of one leetcode question, some technical questions (CS topics like OS), technical details about my past projects, and some time for questions at the end. The problem itself was a medium. It was just a variation of two-sum. I, however, went full retard mode and solved it with a dictionary.

Time complexity was optimal but space complexity was not. I could tell the guy wasn't impressed. I answered all the CS concepts though. I think I also did a decent job of explaining technical details about an open-source contribution I had made. He told me he wouldn't do it that way :p # Reflection I spent an obscene length of time teaching myself about ML concepts (SVM, ensemble models, RNNs) and deep learning concepts (details about transformers, BERT, GPT, how they're trained), but they asked literally nothing about those. I should have focused on acing all easy-medium leetcode questions quickly instead of focusing on medium-hard problems. This caused me to overlook the most basic solution in the second interview. I should have taken a quick look at my algorithms cheat sheet right before the interview. Revising the details of my past projects and research experiences was very helpful. Re-learning pytorch and sklearn syntax was useless. The only coding question was leetcode. (at least for this team) # Appendix - Don't ask for specific names. - When I asked if the second guy worked on any side-projects in his free time, he said apple bars you from doing any open-source projects while you work there; regardless of how similar it is to what you're working on. - I can send my resume if yall are interested EDIT: Got

rejected :p