Frontier AI / foundation models Research Engineer Interview Loop
OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind run research engineer interviews with a shared core and different first steps. Anthropic starts with a CodeSignal assessment that gets harder as you go, and a take-home project. OpenAI starts with several timed coding rounds, both ML and general. DeepMind has technical phone screens, and a hiring committee decides after the onsite. The onsite covers the same ground everywhere: ML coding and debugging, design for distributed training and evaluation infrastructure, an algorithms round, a research or paper discussion or a project presentation, and a behavioral or values interview. None of them asks SQL. Anthropic and DeepMind ban AI tools in live rounds, and at OpenAI it depends on the round.
Practice by round
Easy coding: algorithm basics, and model building blocks like softmax, layer normalization and RMSNorm, activations and losses.
ML coding at onsite level, like attention and causal masks, a KV cache, rotary embeddings, byte-pair encoding and beam search. Practice the "broken neural net" round in debug mode. That's code that runs but learns the wrong thing.
ML systems design: data versus model parallelism, checkpointing a run that lasts days, inference batching, serving under a latency budget, and an evaluation harness. Practice paper discussions and project presentations out loud alongside them.
| Case study | Difficulty |
|---|---|
| Inference Batching, One GPU | Medium |
| Checkpointing Multi-Day Training | Medium |
| Evaluation Harness for Weekly Shipping | Medium |
| Serving Under a p99 Budget | Hard |
| Data vs. Model Parallelism | Hard |
| Data project | Difficulty |
|---|---|
| Keyword Detection on Websites | Hard |
| Chatbot Responses | Hard |
| Predicting Emojis in Tweets | Hard |
| Next Word Prediction | Hard |
The statistics of evaluation, like win rates, pass@k and many slices tested at once. Then LLM concepts: a RAG token budget, LLM-as-judge bias, multimodal alignment and prompt injection. OpenAI's statistics round goes the deepest.