Office Hours

How To Ace The ML Engineer Take-Home Interview Exercise

The most important first round that every ML Engineer should always nail

Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash

This piece is inspired by Tessa Xie who recently wrote a piece on Data Science (DS) take-home exercises, where she shares on the whys and hows of DS take-home exercises and how one should approach it.

Having been interviewing for the past few months and recently securing a job offer as a ML engineer at a decacorn, I thought it would be beneficial to share the things I’ve learned and applied while I was doing ML engineering take-home exercises.

First, a quick introduction of myself…

• Born, raised and working in Singapore
• Graduated in 2017 with a Bachelor’s in Economics and Finance and joined a Japanese investment bank
• Made a career switch to AI/ML at the start of 2020 while grinding on the side (read more about it here!)
• Making the switch to a new ML engineering position for a decacorn at the end of the month

Next, a quick disclaimer…

I don’t claim to be an expert on these take-homes but I want to share what has worked for me while I was doing…