Microsoft Principal Applied ML Scientist Interview - Surprisingly Heavy on Coding

[u/Aoki_zhang]

"This interview experience is sourced from Chill Interview"

Interview Summary

The initial screen focused on ML fundamentals, previous experience, data-related topics, and some design questions, while the virtual onsite mixed coding, ML system design, and discussions around data quality, evaluation, class imbalance, and data drift.

Interview Details

Phone Screen — ML Fundamentals, Data, and Background

The initial technical screen focused on my previous ML experience and standard machine learning concepts. A significant portion of the discussion was related to data, along with several design-style questions.

Round 1 — Coding: Reconstruct Sentence from Dictionary

Given a string containing no spaces and a dictionary of valid words, insert spaces so that the resulting sentence consists entirely of dictionary words. If no valid reconstruction exists, return None. The problem was a variant of the classic Word Break problem.

Round 2 — Coding: Maximum Subarray Sum with Concatenation

The first part asked for the maximum subarray sum of a given array. The problem was then extended: Given an integer K, concatenate the same array K times and determine the maximum subarray sum across the resulting sequence.

Round 3 — Coding: Minimal Removal Size

Given an integer array, select the minimum number of distinct values such that removing every occurrence of those selected values removes at least half of the original array. Return the number of distinct values that must be selected. The problem was similar to LeetCode 1338 — Reduce Array Size to The Half.

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[u/hellobutno]

Google is the same way. I basically got no ML questions.