I have been working in machine learning professionally for a little over 3 years now, 2 of which were spent working as a freelancer through Upwork.com and 1 of which was spent as the founder of a start up company. However, I’ve been considering moving into a more traditional role at a firm mainly to gain the experience and be able to learn from other people at the company. Not to mention freelancing can get pretty lonely over extended periods of time. I didn’t finish my degree yet, however I only need my capstone and ~9 credit hours to complete it, and right now I am just doing the Senior Capstone and am not sure I am going to pursue completion (I know it sounds stupid, just trust I’ve given it a lot of thought, and I am not here to discuss that). Also, my Upwork profile is in great standing and has 5 star reviews for large long-term projects and a 100% job success rate.

Anyways, I ended being contacted by a recruiter on LinkedIn, submitted my resume, and now I have my first interview in the field on Friday. I am not so much nervous as I am just not sure what to expect, and I was hoping that people who have experience with machine learning interviews might be able to give me some pointers and tips, let me know anything I should review and make sure to know, etc. As far as any coding that they may require, I feel fairly confident about being able to solve ML problems effectively. But I don’t know whether they do the standard coding interviews for these roles, in which case I need to brush on my Data Structures and Algortihms for sure.

And lastly, I thought about asking the person who’s going to be interviewing me what to expect, but then decided that doing that is unprofessional and might make look bad or something (I hate fuckin’ corporate politics, but that’s OK, I can deal for awhile). Was this the right decision or is it normal to ask something like that?

Many thanks again guys, and I think it’d be great if this post could just serve as a sort of repository of advice for interviewing for ML jobs in general, so when offering advice I think it’s best to think what’s the best advice I could in general and pretty much ignoring my specific concerns. Cheers!