Machine Learning Engineer · Onsite · Coding

OpenAI — Machine Learning Engineer ✅ Passed

Level: Staff-Level

Round: Onsite · Type: Coding · Difficulty: 7/10 · Duration: 60 min · Interviewer: Neutral

Topics: Machine Learning, Debugging, Transformer Model

Location: San Francisco Bay Area

Interview date: 2026-01-15

Summary

The interview involved debugging a Transformer model to ensure it runs correctly with correct loss and output.

Details

I had to debug a Transformer model, making sure it ran and produced correct loss and output. There were four bugs in total:

1. An error in the attention mask.
2. Incorrect parameter initialization.
3. A misplaced loss function calculation.