I applied through other source. I interviewed at comma.ai (San Diego, CA) in May 2026
Interview
Doing the challenge for 1 month on a top leaderboard
Two phone calls:
One with ML leader who designs the challenge:
Intro -> One brain teaser question -> research details about the submission & future improvements
Another phone call with the CTO:
Two brain teaser questions, that's it.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. Given a fuse that burns 1-minute with unpredictable changing burning rate. Now you have infinite matches, how can you design a 30-second timer?
2. It's one hour before sunset. If you keep walking west, you defer the sunset by how much time?
3. Design a load balancer for data center that can schedule tasks to fully utilize GPU powers
I applied online. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at comma.ai (San Diego, CA) in Jun 2021
Interview
Software engineering challenges and technical questions. Both concrete questions of machine learning and brain-teaser questions. Concrete questions about self-driving and software engineering too. Questions likely depend on specific position applied for.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How to build a vision system to detect motion from video.
Highly suspicious interview process. First, you do an extensive coding project; pick a task from their product's code repository bounty board and complete it in exchange for a small amount of money. Keep in mind, it's a codebase of thousands of lines that you have to learn and understand before starting a task. They also openly admit that your code written during the interview process will ship in their product. Then they evaluate you to see if they want to hire you on as an "intern" in a trial period, during which it was unclear if you got paid at all. Several months later, they re-evaluate you for a promotion to "full-time." Although the person I spoke to was civil, they were quite dodgy to questions and eventually stopped replying at all. Other people's mileage may vary, but somehow, I felt the whole experience was even worse than a Leetcode interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Please pick a task from our bounty board and complete it. After you are done, email us and we will schedule a call to evaluate you as a possible intern for our company. All people in our company start off as interns and eventually get re-evaluated for a full-time position in several months.
