Machine Learning Engineer · Phone Screen · Technical Discussion

Netflix — Machine Learning Engineer ❌ Failed

Level: Intern

Round: Phone Screen · Type: Technical Discussion · Difficulty: 6/10 · Duration: 60 min · Interviewer: Unfriendly

Topics: Machine Learning, Self-Attention, LoRA, Adam, SGD, ViT, CNN

Location: Los Angeles, CA, US

Interview date: 2026-01-31

Got offer: False

Summary

This was a technical phone screen where I discussed my research project and answered questions about machine learning concepts.

Details

I spent 30 minutes discussing my research project. Then, I was asked the following technical questions:

• Describe self-attention
• Why is the attention score divided by sqrt(dim)?
• Describe LoRA, and what are its benefits?
• Why does LoRA reduce GPU memory consumption?
• What is the difference between Adam and SGD?
• Compare ViT and CNN, including the pros and cons
• What factors influence the size of ViT patches?