MAI phone screen was beam search, VO had the CSV one
MAI phone screen was beam search, VO had the CSV one
Did my Microsoft AI phone screen and VO over the last 3 weeks, Copilot org. Still pending, recruiter said I'd hear back "early next week" and that was last week, so who knows.
Phone screen was 45 min. Interviewer spent maybe 10 min on my resume and how I use AI tools day to day, then beam search. First part was just greedy, take the highest prob token each step. Then extend it to keep the top k paths. Last part was length normalization since longer sequences get punished when you keep multiplying probabilities. I switched to summing log probs halfway through, which he seemed to like, and underflow came up as a follow up anyway.
VO was 4 rounds in one day, they wouldn't split it. Coding 1 was CSV parsing, parse into row dicts then query by column. Quoted vs unquoted numbers tripped me up for a bit. Coding 2 was a KV store with snapshots, finished part 1 and most of restore. SD was a chat history service for an assistant, lots of questions on retention and storage cost. HM round was project stuff plus one conflict story.
tbh the ML side mattered way more than I expected for a SWE title. Softmax, log probs, sampling all came up somewhere and I was rusty on half of it.
Replies (4)
did they let you run code for the beam search or just talk through it
ran it in a local IDE and shared screen, no test harness. he gave me a tiny vocab with made up probs to sanity check
early next week can mean anything with MAI lol. took them almost 3 weeks to get back to me
same, mine updated on the portal before anyone emailed me
the full day thing is annoying, I asked to split mine too and got a flat no
was the CSV one the version where you also have to handle commas inside quotes? that part ate like 15 min for me
yeah that showed up near the end, I hardcoded a small state machine for it and it was ugly but passed his cases