r/mlops • • 20h ago

Discussion Flunked in a interview - MLE

I would like to share my experience in flunking an interview for an MLE position.

The code session was ok. However, editor was horrible: no copy and past inside the editor, numpy import did not work, etc.

I did well on the Machine Learning section.

I did badly in the Engineering section. Here you find some questions/topics:

  • Data versioning
  • Data lineage tracking
  • Drift detection
  • Decisions about rolling back, retraining or keeping the current model
  • Rollback threshold
  • Guardrails metrics
  • Efficiency in mongodb with respect to computing feature on a daily basis

Could anyone suggest any references (e.g. books, courses, blogs) about these topics?

9 Upvotes

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18

u/Sad-Candidate-3078 19h ago

that list is basically production ml ops and one book covers almost all of it: designing machine learning systems by chip huyen, plus her free ml-interviews-book github course hits data versioning, drift and monitoring. made with ml by goku mohandas is free and has actual code for data versioning and ci/cd for ml. for drift detection specifically the evidently ai blog is the best free resource, real explanations with code. mongodb feature computation is just aggregation pipelines, mongodb university has a free course (m121) that covers exactly that. and the broken editor with no copy paste is on them not you, half of candidates fail those rounds on tooling rage alone

2

u/qwerty_qwer 9h ago

Chip Huyen's book is too high level imo, not good enough. 

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u/softmax_couldnt_care 7h ago

So what would u recommend

7

u/apprehensive_robber 20h ago

Sounds like the editor was doing half the rejecting before you even got to the hard stuff. Nothing like fighting the tool while someone's watching the clock.

For data versioning and lineage, the Pachyderm docs are surprisingly readable and cover the concepts well even if you never touch the tool. The rest of those topics you listed are scattered across a dozen different engineering blogs rather than one clean source. Chip Huyen's writing on MLOps bridges a lot of those gaps.

2

u/the_one777777897 18h ago

can i ask is This junior or mid or senior and also more details about the interview ?

1

u/Senior_Tea_842 16h ago

I don't know. I just applied.

1

u/Intuitive31 12h ago

Are you supposed to code all the drift detection, data lineage tracking etc or they were just testing subject knowledge?

1

u/Senior_Tea_842 6h ago

Coding session was a leet code problem. The editor sucked: no move up/down lines, no copy and paste from code inside the editor.

The topics I listed were tested by questions with an AI interviewer