Last month I sent my CV for the ML Engineer position at an e-commerce company in my country. After I learned a bit about the company, I decided to click that apply button. The vacancy was posted in the early November, thus I don't really hope to be contacted by the HR.
On January 7th I received an invitation from the HR to conduct a coding test. I was feeling grateful and panic at the same time since I hate coding test and never really practice for that. The HR was kind enough to set the deadline for the next two weeks and thus I polished my rusty coding skill.
The test used Hackerrank and I practiced some interview practice set. I asked my friend who worked there and she said the test was quite challenging for her. Looking at my current ability, it is nearly impossible if I can solve more than 3 questions. So I asked my friend who worked at the orange Chinese e-commerce company in SG how the coding test is evaluated. It is pretty different. But he mentioned that the key is not the technical skill, but rather how well you understand the problem and design an appropriate/optimal solution. Sigh-1*
I didn't wait until the deadline since I can't stand the tension for too long, but luckily I got the next HR message to proceed to the HR interview. Basically I was the one who asked a lot about the position. What kind of people they are looking for, what makes a candidate succeed and common pitfalls, etc. The HR basically asked 3 questions. Background, relevant projects (from previous employment or school), and its impact. Was quite nervous since my research background doesn't really match the criteria they are looking for. But somehow my profile got passed to the next stage, user interview.
The user interview test will consists of 2 session on the same day. Lucky for me or thanks Covid, since the interview will be held online, I can see the interviewer names and do background check beforehand. One of the interviewer is a friend of my senpai in the previous lab I worked for. I tried to get some information but he didn't say much. Sigh-2*
The first user interview session was with the Data Science Senior Lead and one of the Data Scientist. The interview went well (at least that's what I thought). They asked more like how did I perform the experiments in my research in general and a little coding test with python.
The second user interview was with another Senior Lead of Data Science based in Singapore. Firstly, he didn't seem to be that scary compared with his profile picture. Quite a nice person should I say, but I couldn't really explain about the sorting algorithm. The second pitfall is that basically I never touched cloud technology, kubernetes, or docker before. So that's where he mentioned that I should've applied for Data Science position rather than ML Engineer. He gave me a bunch of advices regarding my CV;
- Elaborate more about the experience, the goal, and the stack (tech used)
- Every publication should also made that way. Not necessarily putting the abstract, but rather the overall work that has been done
- Mention the model used.
After the interview I didn't feel quite suitable for the position even though it was 2 vs 1 situation. Not to mention that I will be less doing experiments but rather standardize the internal research in the data team so that their result could be reproduced easily and to maintain running models to keep it up-to-date with the new data.
I guess that's it. I guess I will not secure any position this month either.
