1. Machine learning basics (including forward/backward passes for a simple mlp). 2. A discussion about my experience (went quite deep into some topics). 3. Interview with the team lead. Discussed my previous experience again, deeper discussion of relevant experience to the position. 4. Behavioral round with the HM 5. Machine learning coding round (pretty standard questions - implement dropout, batchnorm, softmax...). 6. Leetcode style problems (3 medium problems in 1 hour) After all - rejection with no feedback. The interview process was very long. A few times I had to ping the recruiter about the next steps.

The overall experience was decent. The first-round interview was reasonable: the interviewer asked detailed questions about distributed training and went through my past project experience. However, the first round explicitly told me the coding portion would not be LeetCode-style questions, but the second round only consisted of LeetCode problems, which I had never practiced. This mismatch between expectations and the actual interview was the main issue.