Got the Pinterest MLE offer, still processing
Got the Pinterest MLE offer, still processing
For context I'm about 6 YOE, mostly recommendation systems work at a mid-size ecommerce company, so I went into the Pinterest MLE loop cautiously optimistic.
Phone screen was the full three part thing, project deep dive first and they really wanted business impact numbers over pure model architecture, then straight into regularization and bias-variance stuff, then a coding problem on weighted random sampling. Finished quick enough that they threw in a second one.
Onsite was two LC hard coding rounds back to back, one of them took me way longer than I wanted to admit, then two ML system design rounds. First was a pin ranking design, second circled back to embeddings for long user history which felt like the same territory covered twice honestly. Behavioral was mostly about a failed project and how I handled negative feedback.
Heard back about two weeks later with an offer. Genuinely relieved, the coding rounds had me convinced I bombed it. Fully remote is the thing that sealed it for me over a higher TC offer I had elsewhere. Anyone else pick Pinterest mainly for WLB over money?
Replies (6)
congrats, the WLB reputation is what's pulling me to apply too honestly
the two SD rounds covering similar ground is such a Pinterest thing apparently, heard that from someone else too
yeah seems like a scheduling thing more than an intentional overlap
how bad was the LC hard round really, trying to gauge how much to prep
honestly the coding felt harder than the ML design for me too, prep LC hard heavy
Is the coding problem in phone screen a LC one?
weighted random sampling as a phone screen coding question is wild, did not expect that one
fully remote over higher TC is such a real tradeoff these days, good choice imo