Replicant Senior Machine Learning Engineer interview questions

I’ve completed 3 out of the 5 stages in the interview process. The first two interviews were with the recruiter and the hiring manager. The third was a pair programming challenge in Python. In it, I was asked to predict the probability of the next word based on the previous two words from a given text. The model has to built from scratch (no libraries allowed). I found this approach quite limiting, as it primarily tested memorization rather than problem-solving skills. In contrast, something like an open-ended classification task would better assess how a candidate approaches a problem, reasons through it, and designs a solution.