Machine Learning Engineer 路 Intern to senior
ML engineering interviews include a software engineering round. This collection covers the Python and engineering questions asked there; machine learning theory and MLOps questions will be added over time.
49 questions
A list is mutable and can be changed after creation, while a tuple is immutable; tuples are slightly faster, use less memory and can be used as dictionary keys when their items are hashable.
== checks whether two objects have equal values, while is checks whether they are the exact same object in memory.
Git is a distributed version control system that tracks changes to files on your machine; GitHub is a hosting service for Git repositories that adds collaboration features such as pull requests, code review and CI.
git fetch downloads new commits from the remote without changing your working branch; git pull runs a fetch and then merges (or rebases) those commits into your current branch.
Give a 60-90 second summary in three parts: what you do now, one or two achievements that show your strengths, and why this role is the logical next step.
Connect two or three of your strongest, provable skills directly to the needs in the job description, give a short piece of evidence for each, and show genuine interest in the team鈥檚 work.
Give specific evidence of deliberate learning through projects, feedback, reading, experimentation or mentoring rather than listing technologies.
Connect something specific about the company, product, engineering challenges or team to your own experience and career goals.
*args collects extra positional arguments into a tuple and **kwargs collects extra keyword arguments into a dictionary, which lets a function accept a variable number of arguments.
Default argument values are evaluated once when the function is defined, so a default list or dictionary is shared between every call that does not pass its own, causing data to leak between calls.
A shallow copy creates a new container but reuses the same nested objects, while a deep copy recursively copies everything so the new object is fully independent.
A classmethod receives the class as its first argument (cls) and can create or configure instances, while a staticmethod receives no automatic argument and is just a function placed inside the class namespace.
Both integrate changes from one branch into another: merge keeps both histories and joins them with a merge commit, while rebase rewrites your commits so they appear on top of the target branch, giving a linear history.
Open the conflicted files, decide what the final code should be between the conflict markers, remove the markers, run the tests, then stage the files and continue the merge or rebase.
Choose a real project with a technical or organisational challenge, explain your specific role and decisions with the STAR method, and finish with the result and what you learned.
Walk through how you noticed the issue, limited the impact, found the root cause, fixed it, and what you changed afterwards so the same class of bug could not happen again.
Choose a real mistake, take ownership, explain the impact, what you did to recover, and what you changed so it would not happen again.
Describe feedback that was uncomfortable but useful, explain how you responded, and show the measurable or observable improvement that followed.
Choose a genuine failure, explain why it failed, what you owned, how you recovered, and what you changed in future projects.
Show how you prioritized the essential outcome, communicated trade-offs, reduced risk and delivered without pretending everything could be done.