Senior Software Engineer, LLM Applications Interview Experience

I went through a pretty team-specific process for a Senior Software Engineer, LLM Applications role: recruiter screen, coding screen, short hiring manager chat, then a four-round virtual onsite. The main thing that stood out was how little they cared about generic AI talk and how much they cared about low-level details like memory, compute, parallelism, GPU utilization, and whether I actually understood things under the hood. My LLM fundamentals round felt good because I could talk through transformers, position embeddings, BERT, and even a small agent design, but the system design round was the hardest by far because they pushed into distributed training at huge scale and wanted more hands-on tool knowledge. The coding rounds were a mix of common problems and performance-minded thinking, and I got the sense they prefer people who can build from scratch rather than hide behind libraries. Overall, it felt more technical and harder to surface-prep for than most other interview loops I’ve done.

I went through a pretty team-specific process for a Senior Software Engineer, LLM Applications role: recruiter screen, coding screen, short hiring manager chat, then a four-round virtual onsite. The main thing that stood out was how little they cared about generic AI talk and how much they cared about low-level details like memory, compute, parallelism, GPU utilization, and whether I actually understood things under the hood. My LLM fundamentals round felt good because I could talk through transformers, position embeddings, BERT, and even a small agent design, but the system design round was the hardest by far because they pushed into distributed training at huge scale and wanted more hands-on tool knowledge. The coding rounds were a mix of common problems and performance-minded thinking, and I got the sense they prefer people who can build from scratch rather than hide behind libraries. Overall, it felt more technical and harder to surface-prep for than most other interview loops I’ve done.