Me postulé en línea. El proceso tomó 3 semanas. Acudí a una entrevista en Rakuten (Singapur)
Entrevista
Recruiter initiated contacted without application from me. Head of Singapore research unit did a phone interview for 30 minutes and talked about some of the applications they do in Singapore. Then they scheduled an hour of interview with presentation review by a two person panel including a senior data scientist who was knowledgable in traditional machine learning.
The worst part of the interview was a the next presentation where the entire presentation was to be repeated to their overlords sitting in Japan over video conference. They barely understood anything I was talking since they didn't get much of the English, waited till I finished and asked their pre-prepared questions. The questions were redundant and unconnected to what I had presented. It also showed that they were completely out of touch with contemporary research in AI and ML. It showed that they were looking for some code monkeys to replicate stuff that was hot in America a few years back. I had heard of this a few years back. I was quite disinterested in the whole interaction although I talked a lot and it waned as the presentation dragged on for more than an hour.
The recruiter then sent a generic "not selected for next round" (they didn't have a next round; this was the last presentation); super rude by any standards to send to a scientist interview candidate; even Google Research that gets umpteen applications send a better rejection letter to someone who did an onsite interview with them. A previous member of our lab from the same lab had attended their interview the last year. He got the offer offer but declined as they did not value his skills. They offered to pay something around SGD 36K (SI Valley value for a deep learning research scientist is at USD 150K base salary and upwards).
I strongly discourage any scientist who values his skills to avoid interviewing with made up research institute.
Preguntas de entrevista [1]
Pregunta 1
Present about your research and how it can be applied to Rakuten
El proceso tomó 2 meses. Acudí a una entrevista en Rakuten
Entrevista
I had a first screening interview after ~3 weeks, and waited 4 weeks to pass the technical interview which has 2 sessions (each session 1h with a staff member). The way to schedule the interview was particularly not smooth and impractical. I had to exchange by emails to fix the dates and get confirmed.
Preguntas de entrevista [1]
Pregunta 1
- Implement cross entropy without using defined function in torch
- Implement a data loader of large JSON text database in pytorch
- Questions about: difference between SFO and RL(HF), what consumes more of GPUs during the training of LLMs, and many other questions about parallel training
The interviewers seemed not too knowledgeable about their questions and likely asked an LLM to generate them. The answer that we discussed was divergent and did not convince me. Both interviewers were very unfriendly and not collaborative during the interview.
Long interview process, everything is automated by AI, so no HR to communicate with.
First round with hiring manager - technical discussions, and design choices.
Second round - coding in python loss function, linked list, sampling function, very algorithm related. Bootstraping techniques
Final round - discussion with hiring manager and director
Me postulé en línea. Acudí a una entrevista en Rakuten
Entrevista
Upon arriving for my interview, I was informed that HR had forgotten to include the interviewer in the meeting invite. They attributed this to a new HR system implemented six months earlier. While the issue was acknowledged, it impacted the overall experience.