I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Rakuten (Bengaluru) in Apr 2019
Interview
Two stupid PhD holders interviewed me. Asked about mathematics and ml theory. Answered almost all but no offer. Please get better employees to conduct your interviews. Biased selection. Please stop selecting bad PhD holders as employees.
First was a online test followed by a interview
The HR calls 1 hour before interview and asks me to bring a laptop for the interview. After I go for interview I noticed that there was no laptop needed at all. That was the level of misinformation, mismanagement out there in that company. From HR to Employees all are dump headed.
I've a very strong ml fundamentals. I wish in this company I had the option to ask some questions to those over qualified PhD interviewer's. Then I would have puzzled them for sure. Stupid company
Their over qualified PhDs says that steepest ascent algorithm for logistic regression modifies the hyperplane even if the instance its trying to predict is correctly classified. When I said the algorithm will only modify the hyperplane when it misclassfies according to the equation then they say I'm wrong. I don't know from where they have passed their PhD. Get better employees Rakuten. I came to home and double checked the concepts and I saw their PhD holders concepts were totally wrong.
The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Rakuten
Interview
I had a first screening interview after ~3 weeks, and waited 4 weeks to pass the technical interview which has 2 sessions (each session 1h with a staff member). The way to schedule the interview was particularly not smooth and impractical. I had to exchange by emails to fix the dates and get confirmed.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
- Implement cross entropy without using defined function in torch
- Implement a data loader of large JSON text database in pytorch
- Questions about: difference between SFO and RL(HF), what consumes more of GPUs during the training of LLMs, and many other questions about parallel training
The interviewers seemed not too knowledgeable about their questions and likely asked an LLM to generate them. The answer that we discussed was divergent and did not convince me. Both interviewers were very unfriendly and not collaborative during the interview.
Long interview process, everything is automated by AI, so no HR to communicate with.
First round with hiring manager - technical discussions, and design choices.
Second round - coding in python loss function, linked list, sampling function, very algorithm related. Bootstraping techniques
Final round - discussion with hiring manager and director
Upon arriving for my interview, I was informed that HR had forgotten to include the interviewer in the meeting invite. They attributed this to a new HR system implemented six months earlier. While the issue was acknowledged, it impacted the overall experience.
