I applied through other source. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Shopee (Singapore) in Apr 2019
Interview
The entire process took about 2 weeks.
The first round was a phone interview with HR. The following are 3 rounds of technical interviews with different people, probably future teammates and manager.
Unlike what I have read from the other interview reviews in Glassdoor, I find that the whole process was conducted very well from appointment bookings, actual interviews to follow-ups.
While some of my interviewers might not be super fluent in English, but it was at the comprehensible level if you are willing to slow down the pace of the conversation sometimes. Moreover, when I was unable to answer certain technical questions, they were still very patient and encouraging instead of making me feel bad.
Some of the Glassdoor interviews reviews here question the purpose of certain technical questions being asked, feeling that it was irrelevant. I myself suffer the same consequence of not able to answer some fundamental computer science questions due to lack of preparation. It didn't feel good. However I did ask the interviewers the intent behind such questions and they fully explained to me and I fully accepted their reasoning.
I was offer the role in the end but I didn't accept it because I have another different offer elsewhere which at the same time. I would have taken Shopee offer if not for my other offer.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. Computer Science questions - sorting, searching, data structure, binary tree. Actual code writing and walkthrough. How to optimize. Big O notations. Efficiency is always a key component here.
2. Machine learning and deep learning questions. Everything from supervised to unsupervised learning. What are the linear classifiers? Explain how CNN works, random forest, recurrent neural network. Clustering. Nearest neighbors. I think we gone through all the topics in machine learning.
3. System design. How to search efficiently. Explain previous experience or projects implemented etc.
Went straight into coding problem once the video call started, without any introduction or other converstion. Typical technical interview with coding problems of leetcode hard level. Also asked some machine learning conceptual questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How do you calculate AUC given a list of positive and negative instances sorted by the predicted score?
It was ok. There was a coding challenge followed by 2 interviews. Coding challenge was doable. 2 interviews lasted 1.5 hours each. One peculiar thing that happened was during the interview process they switched the exact team i was interviewing for 2 times.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Technical interview asked about performing matrix multiplication in an efficient manner and a couple of questions regarding machine learning
1. HR phone call to decide which team you want to interview with. Also asked about salary expectations.
2. Technical interview on Zoom with an engineer
3. Technical interview on Zoom with the team lead
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The HR call was very short and I did not get asked behavioural questions. The HRs are very nice and reply to emails very quickly.
Then the technical interviews. It seems that they have a pool of questions that are shared with all engineers. So the first interviewer asked me backend questions even though I applied for MLE. The interviewer was nice about it when I told them that I have not learned certain topics in school.
I was asked about the Machine Learning projects on my resume. They wanted to see how well you know the specific concepts and ML algorithms you used in these projects.
For the coding challenge, I got a pretty easy question in the first round, about designing a cache. The question asked in the second round was quite difficult and required dynamic programming.
Also, even though the interview started in Mandarin, the interviewer switched to English when I told them that I did not know technical terms in Chinese. We had no problem in terms of communication.
