Software Engineer · Phone Screen · Coding

Perplexity — Software Engineer ❌ Failed

Level: Mid-Level

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

Topics: MapReduce, Deep Learning, Attention Mechanism, Parallelization

Location: San Francisco Bay Area

Interview date: 2025-08-15

Got offer: False

Summary

I had a technical phone screen involving two coding problems related to deep learning.

Details

I was asked two coding questions:

1. A general MapReduce problem: Given A = [a,b,c] and B=[d,e,f], how to use MapReduce to get C=[a+d, b+e, c+f]
2. Context parallelization in terms of segment Q, K, and V. The interviewer asked about the block-wise attention algorithm and how to deal with robust softmax in the attention framework.