I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Hugging Face in May 2024
Interview
Submitted CV + Cover letter as well as answering some screening questions. I was contacted around 1 week later to arrange a screening interview. The initial screening call went well and the interviewer asked questions about my background and experience and how I like to work.
I was then asked to go and complete a take home tech test. This was not time bounded and I was invited to take "as long as you like".
As the role is customer facing, I was asked to imagine that I had been sent questions by customers and to write an email response and a Python notebook that answers the question. I spent probably 2-3 days over the course of a week working on my response.
Upon submitting my response, I had zero feedback for 4 weeks. The first week I got an auto response from the recruiter who was on vacation - ok fair enough. I nudged him on the return date and got a response saying "thanks I'll make sure the team get this". I nudged him again a week later and got "I'll chase the guys"... Management of expectations was very poor and at no point did anyone give a timeline about when I should expect to hear back.
Nearly 2 weeks later I finally got a rejection. The response was professional and friendly and did provide brief feedback on my technical response. The feedback claimed that I had omitted some important details from my answer. However, I had included the detail that they criticised almost word-for-word. They also claimed that they couldn't get the included python notebook to run in Google Colab. Again, I ran it without making any further modifications and it worked first time.
My conclusion has to be that this is a dysfunctional company where people have very poor eye for detail and a chaotic lack of any sort of process. Bullet dodged I think.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Write a Python notebook to fine-tune an LLM using an open source dataset.