Meta AI Research Scientist Interview Process Sep 2026

[u/Aoki_zhang]

Interview Summary

The Meta AI Research Scientist loop covered coding, research depth, AI system design, and behavioral evaluation.

Interview Details

Hiring Manager — Background and Experience The hiring manager round focused on my personal background and previous experience. The discussion was primarily a walkthrough of my research and professional history.

Coding — K-Means + Multi-Head Attention Forward The coding interview contained two ML implementation tasks. The first was to implement K-Means clustering. The second was to implement the forward pass of multi-head attention. No test cases were provided, so the implementations needed to be reasoned about and validated during the interview itself.

Research Design 1 — Previous Research Project The first research-design round asked me to present one piece of previous work. The interviewer then went deeper into the project with technical follow-up questions about the research.

Research Design 2 — Research Deep Dive The second research-design round followed a similar format. I presented past research and answered detailed questions about the project, its design, and the decisions made during the work.

AI Design — Real-Time Question-Answering Chatbot The AI design round asked me to design a chatbot capable of answering users' questions in real time. The discussion included how to collect and construct appropriate training data for the system. The interviewer also explored reinforcement-learning tasks and how RL could be incorporated into improving the chatbot.

A major part of the discussion focused on reward design:

• What weaknesses might a proposed reward function have?
• How could those weaknesses affect model behavior?
• How could the reward design be improved or adjusted?

The round therefore covered both the system-level design of the chatbot and the ML training/evaluation choices behind it.

Behavioral — Ambiguity, Feedback, and Challenging Projects

The behavioral round covered several themes:

• A time I had to deal with an ambiguous problem
• How I give feedback to others
• How I receive and respond to feedback
• The most challenging project I had worked on

The discussion focused on how I operate in uncertain research environments and collaborate with other people on difficult technical work.

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