A complete waste of time. Before you even speak to a recruiter, you're expected to spend four days on a pre-assessment where you deploy a model using an API framework. If you pass, you move on to a 1-hour panel with senior MLEs, supposedly to discuss your work. The final round includes three more 1-hour interviews: technical (likely system design), behavioral, and open QA.
I didn’t make it past the second round. The recruiter emphasized that it would be focused entirely on the pre-assessment—to evaluate ownership, decision-making, and depth of understanding. Makes sense, considering the time commitment. But the MLEs clearly hadn’t looked at the project. The interview ended up being more a blend of what I would expect during the final round (technical/behavioral).
Don't waste your time on the assessment, here are some repos that show the kind of project they expect, beedabug-mle, OMS1996-state-farm, JJD129-SF-MLE
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
They asked a ton of multi-barrelled questions to fully encapsulate everything instead of having a back-and-forth conversation.
After the initial interview, I invested significant time and energy into completing the take-home project. We I did not receive any feedback feels like my efforts were undervalued. Requiring candidates to complete a substantial project without providing feedback is a waste of both the candidate's and company's time.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
classification coding exercise that need to be completed in 3 days
I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at State Farm (New York, NY) in Jun 2022
Interview
Submitted a resume, they responded a couple of days later with a take-home.
The assignment was ludicrous and convoluted. The code included was full of really horrible (as in, start spitting out bogus data in prod) bugs, unused variables, poor structure, etc. The goals/outcomes were spread across multiple files that contradicted themselves.
In the end I was rejected, and they refused to give any feedback. If you give a take home, at least have the decency to review it with the candidate.
I feel like I dodged a bullet.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Some really poorly written Jupiter notebook. Deploy it and make it scalable.
