AI Engineering Intern? — here you go! (Interview Experience)

Amidst my end sem exams, in the middle of filling multiple applications for various tech roles, I found a hidden link in one of the posts by Arsh Goyal's channel stating :

“Internal Hiring: AI/ML Internship hiring at a stealth mode startup. Competitive stipend and background in Machine Learning and Data Science Required. Batch : 2025 passouts”

Umm, these words matched quite well with me and my experience and so without a delay I filled out the form with the resume (I had 3 internships in my resume and two projects — one ML and other LLM related, some awards and achievements and 2 positions of responsibilities).

Two days later when I was heading toward college to take my exam, I got a message stating “We have shortlisted your profile for the interview for the AI engineering intern role, can you give the interview today?”, being busy with the exams I requested to take it the next day.

The next day :

• In the morning I had round 1 which lasted for approx 40 minutes, in which there was one greedy question from codeforces platform to which I discussed the approach, wrote the code, and explained the time and space complexity. There were questions on the research paper I wrote in the first year that got accepted at a conference, like tech stack used, why preferred this over others, and about the dataset and its preprocessing. There were questions about the DistilBert model that I used in my LLM project, why used this model, how it is different from Bert, what its architecture is, and the use case. Some statistics questions — what are outliers, how to detect them, how to remove them, and one situation-based question related to the removal of outliers.
• After 20 mins I got a call that the next interview would be in one hour. Round 2 lasted for around 40 minutes. First I was asked a puzzle related to some bottles and prisoners which I tried solving with binary search first and then gave some thoughts on bit manipulation approach as well. There was a discussion about my previous internship at Carnegie Mellon University related to the data used and the work that I did. Some questions from core subjects were also there specifically from OOPS. Then I was asked about what is linear and logistic regression, their equations and what are the assumptions for linear regression. Then what are LLMs, transformers, the architecture of transformers, and the attention mechanism? (these were follow-up questions) At the end, there was a short discussion about the role and perks that will be provided.

The next day after this :

• I had a call for the third and last round that was expected to be technical + managerial but in my case, it was purely managerial round. General HR questions were asked like what are your expectations, why do you want to work here, by latest when can you join and till when, what is your passion and goals, why did you choose to do an internship in AI roles and work commitments.

Two days later I got the result that I was selected for the role and by evening I got the offer letter. The process was very holistic ranging from standard ML to architecture of models, to DSA, and puzzles along with core subjects. Super excited for the internship and looking forward to an amazing summer ahead filled with lots of learnings!